Guide
A lightweight CodexBar alternative.
CodexBar Lite does one thing CodexBar does - show your Codex usage in the macOS menu bar - and deliberately nothing else. Here's an honest comparison so you can pick the right tool.
What CodexBar does well
CodexBar is an excellent open-source menu bar app that tracks usage across many AI coding tools - Codex, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, and more. If you juggle several providers and want every quota in one dropdown, it's the right choice, and this page won't pretend otherwise.
The cost of tracking everything
Supporting every provider means collecting sessions from wherever each provider keeps them. Per its own documentation, CodexBar can read browser cookies (Safari, Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Edge), use macOS Keychain access to decrypt them, request Full Disk Access for Safari data, store provider API keys in its config file, and optionally inspect the running-process list to detect agent activity. All of that is documented, legitimate, and mostly optional - but it's a lot of surface area if the only number you care about is Codex.
What CodexBar Lite does instead
CodexBar Lite is single-provider by design. It reads one file - ~/.codex/auth.json, the session your existing codex login already created - and makes the minimum request to chatgpt.com needed to show your usage. That architecture means there is nothing to grant:
- No browser or cookie access, on any browser
- No macOS Keychain
- No Full Disk Access, Accessibility, or Screen Recording
- No API keys and no third-party account
- No telemetry or analytics
You still get the parts that matter for Codex: both rate-limit windows with reset times, notifications at 80%, 90%, exhaustion, and credit reset, launch at login, and Sparkle auto-updates.
Side by side
| CodexBar | CodexBar Lite | |
|---|---|---|
| Providers | Codex, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, more | Codex only |
| Browser cookie access | Yes, for web-based providers | Never |
| macOS Keychain | Yes, to decrypt Chromium cookies | Never |
| Full Disk Access | Optional, for Safari data | Never |
| API keys | Optional, stored in config | None |
| Reads | Cookies, config files, local logs | One file: ~/.codex/auth.json |
| Price & license | Free, open source | Free, open source |
Which should you pick?
Track multiple AI tools and want one dropdown for all of them? Use CodexBar. Only care about Codex and want the smallest possible footprint - one number, zero extra permissions? That's exactly what CodexBar Lite is for.
Native, minimal, and private by architecture. Your Codex login is enough.