Claude Usage

Disclaimer: This plugin is an independent community project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or supported by Anthropic. It uses an undocumented endpoint of the Claude OAuth API that may change or stop working at any time without notice.

Obsidian plugin that shows your Claude subscription usage in the status bar: the 5-hour window, the weekly window and, if present, the weekly window for top-tier models.

The plugin reads the OAuth token from the Claude Code credentials file (or the login keychain on macOS) and uses it to query the usage endpoint. It never writes the token and never refreshes it itself.

Display

One 14px ring per window, followed by the percentage and the time left until reset (47m, 4h52m, 4d7h).

• Below the warning threshold: neutral ring
• At or above the warning threshold (default 75 %): ring in --text-warning
• At or above the critical threshold (default 90 %): ring in --text-error plus a ⚠ glyph, so the state does not depend on colour alone

Hovering the status bar item shows all windows with their reset time and the timestamp of the last fetch. Clicking it shows the same values as a notice.

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.13.0 or newer, desktop only
• Claude Code installed and signed in via /login. The token needs the user:profile scope. A token from claude setup-token is not sufficient.
• Linux and Windows: credentials file at ~/.claude/.credentials.json (path configurable in settings)
• macOS: Claude Code stores the credentials in the login keychain (service Claude Code-credentials). The plugin reads them via /usr/bin/security; the file is only a fallback. If macOS asks for keychain access, choose "Always Allow".

Installation

Manual:

1. Copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css to <Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/claude-usage/
2. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin under Community plugins

Via BRAT: add eightk1ll/obsidian-claude-usage as a beta plugin.

Settings

The command Refresh usage now in the command palette triggers a manual fetch.

Error handling and backoff

Errors that do not resolve on their own (expired token, 401, 403, 429, network errors) put the plugin on hold. The hold grows with each consecutive failure: 15, 30, 60, 120, 240 minutes. A Retry-After header from the server extends the hold but never shortens it. The hold also applies to manual refreshes.

The backoff state is persisted in data.json, so restarting Obsidian does not reset it. Without this, a permanent error would produce hundreds of requests overnight and trigger a 429 on its own.

An expired token is detected before the request is sent and shown as a hint. The fix in all cases: run claude and execute /login.

Why these permissions

Obsidian's automated review flags three behaviours. All of them are needed for the plugin to work:

• Filesystem access (fs): reads ~/.claude/.credentials.json on Linux and Windows. Nothing is written.
• Shell execution (child_process): on macOS only, runs /usr/bin/security find-generic-password -s "Claude Code-credentials" -w to read the token from the login keychain. No other command is executed, and only on darwin.
• Network: one request to api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage per poll interval.

Privacy

• The token is read from the local credentials file or the macOS login keychain only. It is sent exclusively to api.anthropic.com as a bearer header.
• No telemetry, no third-party services, no data stored outside data.json in the plugin folder.
• Network access is limited to the usage endpoint listed below.

Technical notes

• The usage endpoint is not part of Anthropic's public API. Expect breakage after upstream changes; the plugin fails closed (shows Claude ?, backs off) instead of retrying aggressively.
• Endpoint: https://api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage with header anthropic-beta: oauth-2025-04-20
• Requests go through requestUrl from the Obsidian API
• No build step: main.js runs as is, no dependencies beyond the Obsidian API

License

MIT