# ccusage

10 Hacker News commenters recommended ccusage and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free CLI that reads local Claude Code logs to show token usage and API-equivalent cost. Main caveat: slow, re-parses logs from scratch.

## Why people recommend it

- Recommended as an established option (3 comments): "great libraries already exist for usage tracking (like ccusage)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065837)) "There’s also the ccusage package that I find useful." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734618)) "I second ccusage, it's nice" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48697011))
- Shows token usage and costs (2 comments): "the answer is `npx ccusage` or any of the other of the trillion ways to see how many tokens you're getting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537842)) "You can use `npx ccusage` to check your local logs and see how much it would have cost through the API." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320090))
- Useful for regular checks (2 comments): "There’s also the ccusage package that I find useful." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734618)) "I like to check in with ccusage pretty frequently" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451815))

## What people warn about

- Slow report generation (2 comments): "The existing tool (ccusage) takes 17–20s to show a usage report" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47262507)) "re-parses from scratch every time with no caching" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47262989))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [agentsview](https://hackerapproved.com/p/agentsview.md): 9 recommend
- [Claude Meter](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-meter.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "ccusage", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ccusage/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).