My AI Coding Workflow Costs $3/Day — Here's How I Keep It That Low

Everyone's talking about AI coding tools. Cursor, Copilot, Claude, GPT-4 — the options keep multiplying. What nobody talks about is how fast the bills add up when you're actually shipping with these tools daily. I'm a solo dev running three products simultaneously. AI coding assistants are non-negotiable for me — they're the difference between shipping a feature in 2 hours vs. 2 days. But I was burning through $150/month before I got intentional about it. Here's what changed. The Problem: Invisible Token Burn Most developers treat AI APIs like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Paste in the whole file. Send the entire codebase as context. Ask vague questions that require massive responses. Then the invoice hits and you're wondering where $200 went. The core issue? You can't optimize what you can't see. I had no idea which prompts were eating my budget until I started actually tracking token usage in real time. What I Actually Did 1. Made Token Usage Visible I put TokenBar in my menu bar. It tr