OhNine: Why I Built a Menu Bar App for Claude Limits

OhNine is a free menu bar app that tracks Claude session and weekly usage limits in real time It sends native alerts at 80%, 91%, and 100% so a session never ends without warning The hard problem was never reading a number, it was making the warning arrive before the cutoff instead of after Building a zero telemetry tool changed how I judge every product I ship after it The Problem: Hitting a Wall You Cannot See For months, my Claude sessions ended the same frustrating way. I would be deep in a conversation, mid thought, actually making progress, and then the reply would just stop. No countdown. No yellow light. No warning that said "you have three messages left, wrap up." One second I was working, the next I was staring at a message telling me to wait for a reset I never saw coming. The frustrating part was not the limit itself. Usage limits exist for a reason, and I understand why they are there. The frustrating part was the total lack of visibility into where I stood. Claude Code and claude.ai will occasionally mention you are close to a cap, sometimes at 97 percent, which is technically a warning and practically useless, because by then you are already mid-thought with no time left to land it cleanly. It got worse once I noticed the layers. There is not one limit to track, there are several stacked on top of each other: a session limit, a rolling weekly cap, and separate caps depending on which model you are running. Switching models mid-session, thinking you had found a workaround, only to hit a wall from a different direction, was its own specific kind of frustrating. None of these layers showed up anywhere. There was no dashboard, no menu bar icon, nothing you could glance at the way you glance at your laptop's battery percentage before deciding whether to plug in. So the wall kept arriving the same way: mid-flow, mid-sentence, with zero warning. Coding sessions got cut off between a question and its answer. Writing sessions lost momentum at the worst possibl