Claude Rate Limit Status Bar

Know how much Claude you have left before you hit the wall. Your 5-hour and 7-day usage windows, as real coloured progress bars in the VS Code status bar, with the countdown to each reset.

Unofficial extension. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Anthropic. "Claude" is a trademark of Anthropic, PBC.

The problem

Claude's limits are two rolling windows, and you only find out you have exhausted one when a request gets refused — usually in the middle of something. The CLI statusline can show a number, but only inside the terminal, only while Claude Code is in the foreground, and never in the editor where you actually work.

What you get

Two lines, always visible, updating on their own:

5h ▁████▌ 12% 4h52m      7d ▁███████▌ 75% 1d03h

For each window: the share consumed, a bar that fills as you burn it, and how long until it resets.

• Real progress bars, drawn with an embedded icon font — not ASCII blocks that break with your font settings
• Colour-coded per line so a glance is enough: green below 50 %, yellow below 75 %, orange below 90 %, red at 90 % and above
• Greyed out when stale, so you never read a stale number as a fresh one
• Hover for the data source and the next refresh time; click anywhere on the line to force a refresh right now

Where the numbers come from

The primary source is the OAuth usage endpoint https://api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage, called with the token Claude Code already stores in ~/.claude/.credentials.json. There is no separate API key to create, and it works the same whether you drive Claude from the CLI or from the official extension. If that token has expired, it is renewed against https://console.anthropic.com/v1/oauth/token with the refresh token from the same file.

Calls are deliberately sparse, because rate-limiting your rate-limit display would be absurd:

• at most one call per 55 s, and no more often than apiIntervalSeconds (default 3 min)
• results are shared between VS Code windows through a cache file in your temp directory, with a lock so ten open windows still make one call
• HTTP 429 triggers exponential backoff — 60 s doubling up to 10 min, with jitter so windows do not retry in lockstep

Fallback. If the endpoint is unreachable, the extension reads the CLI statusline cache at %TEMP%\cs-rate-cache.json instead, and the tooltip tells you it did.

Privacy

The credentials file is read locally, and the token is sent only to api.anthropic.com and console.anthropic.com — exactly the endpoints Claude Code itself talks to. Nothing is transmitted anywhere else. No telemetry, no analytics, no third parties.

Want zero network access? Set claudeRate.apiFallback to false and the extension runs on the CLI cache alone.

Settings

Commands

Troubleshooting

The bars render as empty boxes. Restart VS Code — the icon font is loaded at startup, and a freshly installed extension does not get it until then.

A warning triangle instead of bars. No usable credentials were found at ~/.claude/.credentials.json. Sign in with Claude Code once and it appears.

A clock icon. You hit HTTP 429 and the extension is backing off. The tooltip shows when it will try again; clicking retries immediately, which is usually not what you want.

Nothing updates while VS Code is in the background. It should — refreshes are not paused, and window focus changes trigger a re-render. If the numbers look frozen, hover to check the source and the next refresh time.

License

MIT