Brink

Know when you're on the brink. A tiny panel that lives on the right edge of your screen and shows your Claude Code, Codex and Cursor usage limits at a glance — and, on macOS, which project spent them. For macOS and Windows.

Move the mouse to the thin strip on the right edge → the panel slides out. Hover a ring → a card shows the session limit, weekly limits and reset times. One line at the bottom answers the follow-up question: what used it?

No Dock icon, no menu bar clutter. Just the edge.

Features

• What used it — break the limit down by project, over the current session, the week, this month or all time. Built from the transcripts Claude Code already writes; reads token counts only, never message content. macOS only for now.
• Three looks: Black, Liquid Glass and System. On macOS 26+ the glass is Apple's real, adaptive Liquid Glass (.glassEffect): it turns light or dark from what's behind it, so type stays legible over a white web page and a dark wallpaper alike. On macOS 13–15 it falls back to a frosted NSVisualEffectView blur.
• Notch-style tab that flares into the screen edge; rings scale on hover; the detail card glides between rings
• Notifications when a limit fills up — and again the moment it resets (scheduled for the reset time, so it arrives even if the app is idle)
• 10 languages — follows your macOS language automatically (English, Türkçe, Deutsch, Français, Español, Português (Brasil), Italiano, 日本語, 简体中文, 한국어); override in the menu
• Rings for each provider, colored by usage (green → yellow → red; Claude ring in Claude orange)
• Detail card with Current session, All models and per-model weekly limits (e.g. Fable / Opus / Sonnet)
• Auto-refresh every 2 minutes, manual refresh from the context menu
• Launch at login toggle (System Settings → Login Items compatible)
• Works with whatever CLIs you already have installed — no API keys, no accounts

Requirements

• macOS 13 Ventura or later, Apple Silicon or Intel (the DMG is a universal binary) — or Windows 10 (1809+) / 11 x64, see Windows
• Claude Code, Codex CLI and/or Cursor CLI (cursor-agent login) — whichever you use, logged in
• To build from source: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)

Install

Download

Grab Brink.dmg from the latest release, open it and drag Brink to Applications.

Or with Homebrew (from this tap; Brink isn't in homebrew-cask yet — that needs notarization first):

brew tap semihtalii/brink
brew trust semihtalii/brink     # Homebrew 6+ asks this once for third-party taps
brew install --cask brink

The cask strips the quarantine flag for you, so the Gatekeeper step below isn't needed.

The app is not yet notarized (no Apple Developer account yet), so macOS blocks the first launch. On macOS 15 Sequoia and later the old right-click → Open trick no longer works; do this instead:

1. Double-click Brink once — macOS says it can't be opened. Click Done.
2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to Security and click Open Anyway next to Brink (the button only shows for about an hour after the blocked attempt; launch it again if it's gone).
3. Confirm with your password. You only do this once.

Or skip the dialogs entirely from a terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Brink.app

Every release ships a SHA256SUMS file and a GitHub build attestation, so you can check the DMG came from this repo's CI: gh attestation verify Brink.dmg -R semihtalii/brink.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/semihtalii/brink.git
cd Brink
./build.sh
open dist/Brink.app

build.sh produces both dist/Brink.app and dist/Brink.dmg.

Windows

Brink for Windows is a native C# / WPF (.NET 8) port with the same behaviour: edge strip, rings, detail card, notifications, 10 languages, launch at login. Themes are Black and System (follows the Windows light/dark app theme; there is no Liquid Glass on Windows).

Install: grab Brink-Windows-x64.zip from the latest release, unzip, run Brink.exe. It's a single self-contained file — no .NET install needed (x64 only for now). The exe is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn on first run: More info → Run anyway.

A winget install SemihTali.Brink manifest is prepared in packaging/winget/ and will work once it's merged into winget-pkgs.

Uninstall: quit Brink, delete Brink.exe and %APPDATA%\Brink\. If you enabled Launch at login, turn it off first (it's a HKCU\...\Run entry).

Credentials it reads (never written, never sent anywhere but the vendor):

Settings and an error log live in %APPDATA%\Brink\. Source is in windows/; build with dotnet build windows/Brink.csproj -c Release.

First launch

macOS will ask once:

Brink wants to use your confidential information stored in "Claude Code-credentials" in your keychain.

Click Always Allow. This is Claude Code's own login token; Brink reads it to ask Anthropic for your usage numbers. It is never sent anywhere else.

Usage

Providers you're not signed in to are hidden. If nothing is signed in, a single ? ring tells you what to install; turn a provider on under Providers to see a DEMO ring anyway.

Uninstall (macOS): quit Brink, delete /Applications/Brink.app and ~/Library/Application Support/Brink/. Nothing else is written.

How it works

• Claude — reads the OAuth access token Claude Code stores in the macOS Keychain (Claude Code-credentials) or in ~/.claude/.credentials.json, then calls api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage — the same request Claude Code makes for its /usage command.
• Codex — reads the token in ~/.codex/auth.json and calls chatgpt.com/backend-api/wham/usage.
• Cursor — reads the Cursor CLI session token (Keychain cursor-access-token) and the user id from ~/.cursor/cli-config.json, then calls cursor.com/api/usage-summary.

What used it

The limit tells you how much is gone. Brink also answers the follow-up: which project spent it?

Under the Claude card there's one quiet line — This session · brink · 4.1% — that expands into a per-project breakdown. It works by pairing each observed rise in your limit with the turns that happened in the same interval, weighting them by tokens, and splitting the rise between the projects involved. Nothing is estimated from a price table; only what actually moved the number is assigned.

Four ranges. Session and Week are Anthropic's own limit windows, so their percentages are percent of the limit and match the card. Month (calendar month) and All have no limit behind them — Anthropic resets on five hours and seven days, not monthly — so they show each project's share of the work in that range. The list says so under the rows, and these two survive a limit reset, reaching back as far as the transcripts do.

Consumption that no local session explains — claude.ai, another machine, a background job — is shown as Elsewhere rather than hidden or spread around.

What it reads. Claude Code already writes a transcript per session under ~/.claude/projects. Brink opens those files and takes only these fields:

timestamp · cwd · gitBranch · sessionId · requestId · version
message.model · message.usage.{input,output,cache_read,cache_creation}_tokens

It never reads message.content, tool results, or attachments, and never descends into the tool-results/ and subagents/ directories. Transcripts can contain secrets an agent read from a project; none of that is touched, stored or sent. The database (~/Library/Application Support/Brink/agentcost.sqlite) holds token counts, model names, branch names and project paths — nothing else, and it never leaves the machine.

Sessions started in subfolders of one repository are grouped by their git root, so a project shows up once rather than as Sources, docs and windows.