leocwlau

Ollameter – The fuel gauge for your Ollama cloud allowance

I am using Ollama for OpenClaw, n8n, and Codex, with a Pro subscription. Until recently, I had to regularly access the Ollama website to check the current usage. The 90% notification email did not really help. By the time it arrived, my session usage was usually at the limit already. With the updated plan, there is no more session or weekly limit. The notification email is now even less helpful than before.

I wanted a simple and easy way to monitor my Ollama subscription usage and see how it tracks against elapsed time, so I can adjust my work and usage across those AI tools.

There are multiple “Ollameter” apps on GitHub already. Some monitor local resource usage. A few monitor cloud usage and subscriptions, which is what I wanted. However, the subscription-focused ones use an undocumented API, and I did not want to depend on that. Now Ollama has official /api/balance and /api/usage endpoints that serve the purpose. I have not seen any update or new app using them, so I vibe-coded and built another Ollameter myself.

I use a Mac, so Ollameter is a native macOS menu bar app for anyone using Ollama Cloud. The current pace of usage is one glance away, straight from the menu bar.

What it does

  • Live usage pace in the menu bar, refreshed every 60 seconds
  • One popover with everything: balance, remaining allowance, purchased credits and the next reset time
  • Per-model usage by request count and dollar amount, across 24-hour, 7-day, and 30-day views
  • Understands both current credit-based plans and legacy session or weekly plans
  • Start at login supported. No Dock icon, ever
Ollameter usage panel: 0.6% under pace, $3.33 of $60 used, $56.67 balance, resets Nov 18 at 12:57
Usage dashboard showing $3.33 of $60 used (5.5%), 4.3% of period passed, and +1.3% ahead of pace; balance $56.67

The pace, and what backs it

Most usage dashboards tell you how much you have spent. Almost none tell you how fast you are spending it. Ollameter shows both as a single comparison: the percentage of your allowance used, minus the percentage of the billing period elapsed, to one decimal place.

Dark red means you are burning the budget faster than the calendar. Green means you are on pace or better. Think of it as a fuel gauge with opinions.

  • Fully native SwiftUI. No Electron, no web view, no document window
  • Zero third-party dependencies. The build uses Apple’s own tools and nothing else
  • No manual refresh button, on purpose. The public balance API is rate-limited, so the app polls on a 60-second cycle and updates arrive on the next one
  • If the network drops, last-known figures stay visible with the time they were fetched. Old data never pretends to be fresh
  • Your API key lives only in the macOS Keychain and travels only over HTTPS to ollama.com. Never logged, never shown in full, never exported
  • No telemetry and no analytics. Nothing is collected
  • The app speaks only to the documented Ollama balance and cloud usage APIs

Get it

I am not paying Apple for the Developer Program, so I cannot notarise the binary or publish it on the Mac App Store for distribution. You have to check out the source from GitHub and build it locally. Building requires a full Xcode installation, because the SwiftUI macro plugins ship with Xcode only. Apple Command Line Tools alone will not work. The README contains the full details.

Ollameter on GitHub

Clone the repository and two commands do the rest:

./scripts/build-app.sh
cp -R .build/release/Ollameter.app /Applications/

Try it if you are also an Ollama subscriber. Let me know any comments or improvement suggestions.