BlueToken: AI Water Footprint

See the freshwater your AI assistant actually costs, right inside your editor.

Every AI response heats data-center servers. Cooling them uses real freshwater. BlueToken turns that invisible cost into a number you can see in Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Antigravity, and any VS Code-based editor.

Open source · MIT · 100% local. Chat data never leaves your machine.

Author: Shubham Vishwakarma · ★ Star on GitHub

Automatic tracking

Install

From a VSIX release

npm install
npm run package

Then: Extensions → ⋯ → Install from VSIX… → releases/<version>/bluetoken-<version>.vsix

Prebuilt copies (when present locally) live under releases/.

From source ( Extension Development Host )

npm install
npm run compile
# Press F5 in VS Code / Cursor

Repository layout

bluetoken/
├── src/                 # TypeScript extension source
├── resources/           # Icon + SQLite reader scripts (plain JS)
├── media/               # Screenshots / GIFs for README & Marketplace
├── releases/            # Versioned .vsix builds (see releases/README.md)
│   └── 0.1.4/bluetoken-0.1.4.vsix
├── docs/                # Maintainer docs (publish checklist, agent handover)
├── scripts/             # Build helpers (package VSIX into releases/)
├── .github/             # Issue / PR templates
├── package.json         # Extension manifest
├── README.md
├── CHANGELOG.md
├── CONTRIBUTING.md
├── PRIVACY.md
├── SECURITY.md
├── CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
└── LICENSE

What you see

• Status bar — live session water total
• Side panel — water glass, session + all-time stats, research & author links
• Persistent — totals survive restarts

The metric

Default Scope 1+2 ≈ 0.004 mL / token (cooling + electricity-generation water).

Research (also in the panel via BlueToken: Open Research Papers):

• Making AI Less Thirsty (arXiv) — UC Riverside
• ACM version
• UCR News

Also referenced for rates: Vanderbilt (2025), Google Cloud Gemini disclosures, OffsetAI. Per-model rates live in settings / src/modelRates.ts.

Privacy

BlueToken only reads local editor databases on your disk. Nothing is uploaded. See PRIVACY.md.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Please follow the Code of Conduct.

Before opening a PR: npm run compile must pass. Note which IDEs you tested.

Publish / Marketplace

Maintainer checklist: docs/PUBLISH.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Built by Shubham Vishwakarma.