TKN.

How to check your AI API spend from your phone

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Three options, in increasing order of usefulness: the provider console in a mobile browser, a script that messages you, or a native app that reads the billing APIs.

The reason this question gets asked at all is that spend problems don't respect working hours. A runaway loop on Saturday morning is the case that matters, and the answer "open your laptop" is why most people find out three weeks later instead.

Option 1 — the provider console in mobile Safari

Works. Is unpleasant.

Dense tables, wide charts, and a separate login per provider. Add them to your home screen if this is your approach — it at least removes the navigation.

The structural limitation is not the layout: no provider will ever show you another provider's number. Four tabs, four logins, and you do the arithmetic.

Option 2 — push the number to somewhere you already look

A daily script that posts to Slack, Telegram, or email. Cheap and effective if you already have somewhere you reliably read.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
START=$(python3 -c 'import time; print(int(time.time()) - 86400)')

TOTAL=$(curl -s "https://api.openai.com/v1/organization/costs?start_time=$START&limit=1" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_ADMIN_KEY" \
  | jq '[.data[].results[].amount.value] | add // 0')

curl -s -X POST "$SLACK_WEBHOOK" \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d "{\"text\":\"OpenAI spend yesterday: \$$TOTAL\"}"

Run it from cron or a scheduled GitHub Action. Needs an admin key.

Good: you control it, no third party, works with any channel. Bad: you maintain it, it's one provider per integration, and a daily digest is easy to start ignoring.

Option 3 — a native app

Several exist on the App Store. They read the same billing APIs and present them for a phone screen.

What to compare:

  • How many providers, and can it combine them into one number?
  • Where does it store your key? On-device secure storage vs the vendor's servers is the question that matters — see is it safe to give an app your admin key?
  • Does it alert, or only display? A dashboard you have to open has the same problem as the console.
  • Can it act? Showing you a bad number is half an answer.

TKN is our answer to those four: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Gemini in one figure with a per-provider breakdown; keys in the iOS Keychain behind Face ID and device-only by default; spend rules checked against live daily spend; and a kill switch that revokes at the provider — from the same screen, without a laptop.

Others cover adjacent ground — iOS apps for tracking AI API spend, compared.

The honest limitation

Whatever you use, billing data is daily. A phone app cannot page you 90 seconds into a runaway loop, because the data does not exist yet. Why billing APIs are daily.

What a phone genuinely changes is the second half of the problem: the distance between finding out and being able to do something. If the answer is bad and you're not at a desk, being able to revoke the key from where you're standing is the difference between a bad hour and a bad weekend.

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