Estimating Claude Code's "5-hour window" from local logs — what I learned building an always-on usage gauge

Users of Claude Code face usage limits and billing challenges due to a lack of first-party dashboards for tracking spend. To solve this, developers are building custom Windows gauges and cost dashboards by introspecting the usage field in local JSONL files. These tools estimate remaining capacity within the five-hour window and aggregate per-developer burn rates. By reading structured token counts from Anthropic's API, teams can now monitor input, output, and cache tokens in real-time.