ccusage alternative: the window, not the spend

The short version

What ccusage does well

Coding agents write their own session records to disk as they work. ccusage reads those records and reports them back: what each day cost, which session was expensive, which model you actually used. Nothing leaves your machine and there is no account involved.

If you are trying to work out where the money went, that is the tool, and CrewTower is not a substitute for it. CrewTower counts no tokens, reports no dollar figure, and keeps no history at all.

Where the numbers come from, and why it matters

Any tool that reads local session files is reconstructing your usage from the trail your agent left. That is accurate for counting tokens, because the tokens are in the trail. It is a weaker basis for answering how close am I to being cut off, because your plan's limits live with your provider, not on your disk.

CrewTower answers that second question from the source. For Claude Code it calls Anthropic's own usage endpoint with the login Claude Code already uses, so the percentage in your notch is the figure Anthropic itself holds. For Codex it reads the Codex CLI's own rate limit reporting. The session window and the weekly window both show a percentage used and a countdown to reset.

The other half of CrewTower

The usage strip is one line at the bottom of the panel. The rest of CrewTower is about a different problem entirely: an agent runs unattended until it needs a human, and then it stops in a terminal tab you are not looking at.

CrewTower brings that moment into the notch with the command on the card, and you approve, deny or answer from there. The agent's hook is blocking on a local socket and your decision travels back down it, so the prompt resolves in place without your terminal ever coming forward. A destructive shell command is flagged before you press. When you do want to be in the terminal, Jump lands on the exact tab or split pane.

If you searched for a ccusage alternative because you wanted a spend report in a nicer wrapper, that is not this. If you searched because you keep discovering, twenty minutes late, that something was waiting on you, that is exactly this.

If you would rather pay for that answer: SessionWatcher

ccusage is a command and it is free. SessionWatcher is the same question in a menu bar app you buy, so it is the third thing worth naming on this page.

If what you want is the spend and the limits, watched closely, across more tools than CrewTower reads quotas for, SessionWatcher is built for exactly that and CrewTower is not competing with it. The two answer different halves of the day: one tells you what the meter reads, the other tells you which session is standing still waiting for a human. Its site publishes nothing about approving a prompt or jumping to a terminal, so those rows say so rather than guessing at an answer.

Running both

Nothing conflicts. ccusage is a command you run when you want the breakdown; CrewTower watches sessions, answers prompts over the hook socket, and keeps the window percentage on screen. Plenty of people keep both, and the honest reason to keep both is that neither one answers the other's question.