Cota — your Claude usage limits, in the tray

The Cota panel: 88% weekly in amber with a progress bar, session at 46% and a per-model limit at 3% below it, then a projection reading "At this rate: full in 3h 20m". — Left-click the tray icon. Right-click for the menu.

Claude Code will tell you your limits when you ask it — /usage, in a session you already have open. Cota is the same numbers when you didn't ask.

A ring sits in the tray — the macOS menu bar or the Windows notification area — and fills as your fullest limit does. It goes amber at 75% and red at 90%, so "I have two days of weekly left" is something you know rather than something you check — and finding out you are nearly out stops being something that happens halfway through a refactor.

Actual size in the tray: 16 pixels on Windows, a touch larger in the macOS menu bar. These are the same ring, drawn larger here by the same code.

What it does

Every bucket. Session, weekly, and any per-model limit your plan has, each with the time until it resets.
Tells you when you will run out. At this rate: full in 3h 20m, fitted from the slope of your own usage.
Says where the week went. Which project ate it, read from the transcripts already on your disk.
Interrupts rarely. Toasts at 50%, 80% and 95%, once each per limit per window — and when a limit you were actually near resets.
Costs nothing to run. One 1 MB executable, no runtime dependencies, about 5 MB resident and no measurable CPU.

Privacy

Cota reads the OAuth token Claude Code already stores on your machine and sends it to api.anthropic.com — the service that issued it. That is the only host it ever contacts. There is no account, no telemetry, and no server of ours in the middle.

It never asks you for a credential of its own, and it does not cache or refresh the token: Claude Code already does that, so Cota simply re-reads the file each time.

TLS goes through the operating system's own trust store — the Windows certificate store, the Keychain's roots on macOS — rather than a bundled root set, and on Windows the system proxy is respected, so it keeps working on a managed machine where the proxy inspects traffic.

Frequently asked questions

Which platforms does it run on?

macOS 11 or later (Apple silicon) and Windows 10 or later (x64). The page offers the build for the system you are on; both are on the releases page.

Do I need anything installed first?

Claude Code, signed in at least once on this machine. Cota finds the token it already stored. If you have never signed in, run claude once and the tray icon picks it up on its next poll.

Does this work with a Claude Pro or Max subscription?

Yes — those are exactly the plans that have the limits this shows. The panel names your plan at the top.

How often does it check?

Once a minute, and never twice within ten seconds however often you click. Opening the panel does not check at all: it paints from the last reading, so looking at it is free.

Where does the "at this rate" estimate come from?

From Cota's own samples of the reported percentage over time, fitted with least squares.

It deliberately does not come from counting tokens in your transcripts. Subscription buckets are opaque server-side counters — cache reads, model tier and effort all weigh differently, and none of those weights are published — so any local token total is a proxy whose error cannot be bounded. Sampling the percentage sidesteps that entirely: the slope is right regardless of how the weighting works.

Is the "mostly: project" number exact?

No, and it is labelled as an estimate. It weights tokens from your local transcripts by the published Opus price ratios and reports a share between projects — never a share of any limit. Treat it as "where did the week go", not as a number that adds up to anything.

Will it keep working?

The endpoint it reads is the one Claude Code's own /usage uses, and it is undocumented. It will change at some point.

Cota is written for that: every field is optional, unknown fields are ignored, there is a fallback for the older response shape, and the server's own severity grading is taken as a floor rather than gospel. When it does break, the ring goes to a grey dashed circle and the menu says why, rather than showing you a number that is quietly wrong.

Why does my computer warn about it the first time?

The builds are not code-signed by a paid developer certificate, so each OS asks once. On Windows, SmartScreen shows a notice — click More info, then Run anyway.

On macOS, drag Cota into Applications first (Gatekeeper can't be cleared while it is still on the disk image). Double-click it — macOS blocks it and offers only Done — then open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway next to Cota. That is remembered, so it is a one-time step. If you prefer the terminal: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Cota.app, then open it normally.

The source is on GitHub if you would rather build it yourself: the Rust toolchain and nothing else — build.ps1 on Windows, build.sh on macOS.

What does "Cota" mean?

Quota, in Portuguese. It is a sibling to Cantos — corner — which does macOS-style hot corners for Windows.