Free tools · The meter
Own the memory. Rent the model. Meter the spend.
chanio answers from your notes on your Mac for $0, and sends only what is worth sending: a short brief instead of your whole history, with your own key, under a cap you set. The meter keeps the receipts.
What the meter printed afterwards
The same session, then chanio meter. Measured lines and estimates are kept apart.
today 3 answered on this Mac · 1 held · 1 captured · 1 night(s) · 2,488 on-device tokens = $0.00
sent: 0 by you + 0 nightly batch(es), 0 tokens = $0.0000 (measured)
estimates, not bills: briefs trimmed ~0 tokens of notes (~$0.0000); the on-device answers would have cost ~$0.0040 at Claude Sonnet 5 list price
all-time 3 answered on this Mac · 1 held · 1 captured · 1 night(s) · 2,488 on-device tokens = $0.00
sent: 0 by you + 0 nightly batch(es), 0 tokens = $0.0000 (measured)
estimates, not bills: briefs trimmed ~0 tokens of notes (~$0.0000); the on-device answers would have cost ~$0.0040 at Claude Sonnet 5 list price
Daily cap for sends: $1.00 (chanio budget set <amount>). The meter is meter.jsonl — one line per event, yours to read or delete.The prices it uses
Anthropic list prices per million tokens, September 2026. You pick the model in the door's Settings or with chanio models.
| Model | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1 | $5 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 (default) | $2 | $10 |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5 | $25 |
| The model on your Mac | $0 | $0 |
A typical brief is a few hundred tokens, so a send with a short answer costs well under a cent on Sonnet 5. The nightly batch sends every held question at once: pennies to about fifty cents.
Questions people ask
What does the meter measure, and what does it estimate?
Measured: every answer your Mac gives (tokens in and out, at $0), and every send — a brief you send from the door, chanio ask --send, or the one nightly batch — using the token counts Anthropic returns, priced at list. Estimated, and labelled that way: how many tokens the brief saved against the notes it drew on, and what the answers your Mac gave would have cost at Claude's list price. The two are never added together.
What stops a surprise bill?
A daily cap you set (default $1.00). It is a ceiling, not a trigger: a send goes only if today's spend plus that send's worst case — its input plus the longest answer allowed — stays under the cap. The nightly batch is checked the same way; if it could pass the cap, the held questions are packed for you to paste instead. Questions that look private (a social security number, a date of birth, health details, a password) are never sent at all.
Does chanio resell tokens or mark up API fees?
No. With the free starter, a send goes straight from your Mac to Anthropic with your own key; chanio has no server in that path and never sees the question, the brief or the answer. Without a key, nothing is sent: the held questions are packed as a file you paste into the AI you already use.
Where does the meter live?
In ~/chanio/meter.jsonl on your Mac: one line of plain JSON per event. chanio meter reads it; so can any other tool. Delete it and the history is gone.
Why is most of it $0?
Because the everyday questions — what is due, what did I decide, what did that chat say — are answered from your own notes by a small model on your own chip. chanio shows you the sentence in your notes that the answer came from, and holds back an answer that wanders beyond them.
Get the starter, with the meter: one line on a Mac →