I Built a Menu Bar Revenue Dashboard With Claude Code

My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.

To find out how last month went, I used to open six browser tabs. Or more.

Two Stripe dashboards, Gumroad, RevenueCat, PayPal, and the Amazon Associates page that, by the way, looks like it was designed in 2011. Probably was.

That's annoying.

So I used Claude Code to build a Mac menu bar app. Now there's a number in my menu bar that shows my earnings in detail. It updates every thirty minutes. I click it and see which platform brought what.

The app I didn't buy

There is probably a paid Mac app for this out there. I bet. I didn't want to buy or subscribe to another tool, though.

So my little menu bar app idea was born. It takes my app subscription payments (for the paid apps I have in the App Store). My earnings from Medium, Substack and Gumroad via Stripe, my PayPal income (mostly from affiliate marketing), and a few other sources.

Then, it checks all, because some overlap. And then I have a clean number of my income.

The tool

About 600 lines of Python, no dependencies, nothing to install. It reads the credentials from a folder where all my keys live, hits five APIs, converts everything to euros using the European Central Bank's daily rate, and prints this:

Umsätze 01.07.2026 bis 31.07.2026

Stripe · Writing  (12 Zahlungen)
  Medium                    …
  Substack                  …
  Gumroad                   …

PayPal  (2 Zahlungen)
  WriteStack (Affiliate)    …

RevenueCat  (26 aktive Abos)
  App subscriptions         …

German, because it's for me.

It costs nothing to run and there's no account anywhere. My revenue numbers don't travel to a company I've never heard of. The API keys never leave the laptop, and I gave every one of them read-only permission, so the worst case is somebody learns what I earn.

Menu bar

I wanted a number in the menu bar, without opening anything.

Writing that as a native Mac app is a whole lot of Swift code. Don't need that right now.

Instead I used SwiftBar. It's a free, open source app that runs any…