Make It Rain 💸

A menu bar app that tracks your Claude Code spend today. Every $1 spent flies
a 💵 off the menu bar — and every $100 makes it rain. 💸

The dollar figure is a rough estimate from per-token pricing.

Requirements

• Node.js 22+ (you have this if you run Claude Code)
• macOS, Windows, or Linux
• Claude Code writing session logs to ~/.claude/projects (the default)

Install

From npm

npm install -g @gceico/claude-make-it-rain

This installs the claude-make-it-rain command.

From a git checkout

git clone https://github.com/gceico/claude-make-it-rain
cd claude-make-it-rain
npm install

Local development install (link the global CLI to your checkout)

git clone https://github.com/gceico/claude-make-it-rain
cd claude-make-it-rain
npm install
npm link                     # makes the global `claude-make-it-rain` command point at this checkout
claude-make-it-rain          # runs your local copy
# ...
npm unlink -g @gceico/claude-make-it-rain   # undo when you're done

Run

Installed globally:

claude-make-it-rain

That's it — the app detaches from the terminal and lives in your tray/menu
bar. You can close the terminal afterwards.

From a checkout:

npm start                        # foreground (logs in the terminal, Ctrl-C to quit)
node bin/make-it-rain.js         # detached, like the installed CLI
node bin/make-it-rain.js --foreground   # same launcher, but stays attached

On launch it scans today's session logs and prints a line like:

MakeItRain: today so far $13.92 (78 entries)

(Only visible when running in the foreground — the detached mode is silent.)

Quit

Click the tray item and choose Quit (or Ctrl-C if running in the
foreground). Only one instance runs at a time — launching a second one exits
immediately.

What you'll see

• A tray item like 💸 $12.34, switching to 🤑 once today's spend hits
  $100. The dollar amount next to the icon is macOS-only; on Windows/Linux
  the amount lives in the tooltip and the context menu (a green square is
  shown as the icon).
• Click the tray item for a menu with today's total, today's input/output
  token counts, Make It Rain (test) / Stack of Money — $10 /
  Five Stacks — $50 items to preview each animation, the daily-leaderboard
  controls (see privacy section below), and Quit.
• A 💵 flies off the tray item every time the running total crosses a whole
  dollar. Bigger milestones burst thick money stacks from the tray the
  first time today's total crosses them — $10 fires one stack of 10 bills,
  $50 fires five — and crossing every $100 multiple plays a ~6-second
  full-screen shower of 💵💸💰🤑. The overlay is click-through and only exists
  while animating.

Staying up to date

Make It Rain checks npm once a day (fail-silently — a missing network never
disturbs the app) to see whether a newer version has been published. When one
is available it shows a one-time desktop notification and adds an
⬆️ Update to vX.Y.Z item to the top of the tray menu; clicking it runs
npm install -g @gceico/claude-make-it-rain@latest for you and then prompts
you to quit and relaunch to apply the update.

How it works

• Polls ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl every 3 seconds, incrementally reading
  only newly appended bytes. The total resets automatically at local midnight.
• Every assistant message with a usage block recorded today (local
  time) is priced per-million-token rates keyed off the model id, with
  cache-read tokens at 10% of the input rate and cache-write tokens at
  1.25x/2x the input rate for 5-minute/1-hour ephemeral cache creation.
• Entries are deduplicated by requestId:messageId since the same entry can
  appear more than once across files.

Daily leaderboard & privacy (GDPR)

Make It Rain has an optional cloud leaderboard of the day: a friendly ranking
of who made it rain hardest today, by anonymized tag.

👉 See the live board at aiburn.dev — it resets every
day (UTC) and shows the top anonymized tags along with the repo's GitHub star
count.

What is sent

Exactly two things, once an hour:

• your anonymized gamer tag (e.g. TurboLlama7392), generated randomly on
  first run and stored locally;
• today's estimated total in USD.

That's it. No account, email, IP-derived identity, file paths, project
names, model names, prompts, or any other data leaves your machine. The server
does not log IPs or per-user metadata, stores only tag → max daily total, and
resets every day (UTC) — old days are pruned automatically.

It's opt-out, clearly disclosed, and easy to disable

Telemetry is on by default but fully under your control from the tray menu:

• Share on daily leaderboard — a checkbox to turn reporting on/off instantly.
• New random tag — reroll your anonymous tag any time.
• View leaderboard… — opens the landing page in your browser.
• Leaderboard tag: … — shows the exact tag being used.

Your choice is saved in a local config file (config.json under Electron's
userData directory — e.g. ~/Library/Application Support/make-it-rain/ on
macOS, ~/.config/make-it-rain/ on Linux, %APPDATA%\make-it-rain\ on Windows).
You can also edit it by hand: set "telemetryEnabled": false, change
"gamerTag", or repoint "apiBaseUrl".

Because no personal data is collected and the tag is anonymous, random, and
user-changeable, there is nothing to identify you by — consistent with GDPR data
minimization. Disabling telemetry stops all network activity. The client points
at the reference server at aiburn.dev by default; if it is
ever unreachable the client fails silently: no errors, no crashes, no retry
storms.

Running the backend yourself

The server is a tiny, zero-dependency Node HTTP app under server/. Point the
client at it via apiBaseUrl in config.json.

node server/index.js          # listens on http://localhost:8787

• POST /api/report — body { "tag": "...", "total": 12.34 }
• GET /api/leaderboard — today's top tags as JSON
• GET /api/stars — the repo's GitHub star count, fetched server-side and
  cached ~10 min (the page can't call GitHub directly under its strict CSP)
• GET / — the landing page (server/public/index.html)

State lives in a small SQLite database (server/data/leaderboard.db, git-ignored),
backed by the built-in node:sqlite module — still zero npm dependencies. The
server uses node:sqlite (added in Node 22.5), and the desktop app shares the
same Node >= 22 baseline. Set LEADERBOARD_DB to override the file path.

The reference server deploys to Railway with railway up ./server,
built from server/Dockerfile (node:24-alpine, no npm install, sleeps when idle;
persistent volume mounted at /data, LEADERBOARD_DB=/data/leaderboard.db).

Testing & debug hooks

npm test                                  # unit tests (pure Node, no Electron window)
MIR_TEST_RAIN=1 npm start                 # trigger the $100 rain 1.5s after launch
MIR_TEST_STACK=5 npm start                # burst 5 money stacks 3s after launch
MIR_TEST_SHOT=/tmp/overlay.png npm start  # save a PNG of the overlay 4s after launch

Project layout

• bin/make-it-rain.js — CLI launcher; spawns Electron detached.
• main.js — tray item, overlay window management, monitor wiring, IPC,
  single-instance lock.
• lib/usage-monitor.js — incremental JSONL tailing, parsing, dedup, daily
  reset (pure Node, no Electron — unit-testable).
• lib/pricing.js — per-model USD/1M-token pricing table and per-entry cost
  calculation (pure Node).
• lib/milestones.js — first-time-today spend milestones ($10/$50) that burst
  money stacks, and the crossing math that fires only the highest one (pure
  Node, no Electron — unit-testable).
• lib/leaderboard-client.js — anonymized-tag generation, config persistence,
  telemetry toggle, and hourly fail-silent reporting to the cloud leaderboard
  (pure Node, no Electron — unit-testable).
• server/ — tiny zero-dependency Node HTTP backend (index.js + db.js, a
  node:sqlite store) and the leaderboard landing page (public/index.html).
  Deploys to Railway with railway up ./server.
• overlay.html + preload.js — transparent, click-through, always-on-top
  fullscreen overlay that renders the dollar-fly and money-rain animations,
  hiding itself when idle.
• test/usage-monitor.test.js — pricing math, dedup, day filtering,
  incremental/partial-line reads, crossing math.
• test/leaderboard-client.test.js — tag generation/sanitization, config
  first-run/stability/recovery, telemetry toggle, and fail-silent reporting.
• .github/workflows/ — CI (tests on Linux/macOS/Windows × Node 22/24)
  and the npm publish pipeline.
• docs/DECISIONS.md — architecture & decision log for the leaderboard,
  deployment, publishing, and security/anti-cheat work.

Releasing (maintainers)

Publishing is automated by .github/workflows/publish.yml, which runs the
tests and npm publish whenever a GitHub Release is published.

One-time setup:

1. Create an npm automation access token
   (npm → Access Tokens → Generate → Automation).
2. Add it to the repo as a secret named NPM_TOKEN
   (gh secret set NPM_TOKEN).

To cut a release:

npm version patch          # bumps package.json + creates a git tag (e.g. v1.0.1)
git push --follow-tags
gh release create v1.0.1 --generate-notes   # this triggers the publish workflow

The first publish of the scoped package goes out as public (configured via
publishConfig.access in package.json, and --access public in the
workflow). Provenance is enabled, so the package links back to the exact
commit and workflow run that built it.

Caveats

• The cost shown is a satirical estimate based on the pricing table baked
  into lib/pricing.js; it is not pulled from any live pricing API and may
  not match actual billing.
• If ~/.claude/projects doesn't exist or has no session logs for today, the
  app simply shows $0.00 and keeps polling.
• No state is persisted across restarts — it rescans today's logs on launch.
• Animations render on the primary display only.

Who's behind this

I'm Gabriel. I build things like this for fun and for my own work, and ship the
ones that turn out good.

Check One's Skills for my own Claude Skills collection.

I also run AI Workshops and help people turn their expertise into compounded value.
Come say hi at Aibl.to

— Gabriel C.