Why I priced TokenBar at $5 when every AI tool wants a subscription

A lot of AI products feel like they were priced by a VC spreadsheet. You land on the site, see a polished gradient, and then get hit with $20/month, $30/month, or "contact sales" for something that basically solves one sharp pain. I didn't want to do that with TokenBar. TokenBar is a tiny Mac app that sits in your menu bar and shows your token usage and cost in real time while you use LLM apps. I built it because I was tired of that gross feeling of using Claude or ChatGPT heavily and having no idea what the damage would be until later. The obvious startup advice would have been: make it a subscription. Recurring revenue. Better LTV. More "serious" business. Instead, I priced it at $5 lifetime. That sounds stupid if you look at it like a SaaS founder. It made perfect sense once I looked at the actual problem. I wasn't building a platform. I was building a seatbelt. A seatbelt doesn't need a monthly plan. The job of TokenBar is simple: sit there, stay out of the way, and stop you from g