Expose organization API credit balance to statusLine scripts (and via Admin API)

[flannk]

Summary

Pay-as-you-go API users have no programmatic way to see their remaining credit balance. The statusLine stdin payload includes model and rate_limits.{five_hour,seven_day}.used_percentage, but nothing about the actual money left in the account.

Why this matters

• The 5h / 7d rate-limit bars measure throughput, not money. They tell me nothing about whether my next call will fail with credit balance is too low.
• The console at console.anthropic.com shows the balance, but there is no public API endpoint for it. GET /v1/organizations/balance returns 404.
• For people topping up credits manually (no auto-recharge), this means jobs can die mid-run with no warning. A statusLine bar would have warned me hours earlier.
• I built a local approximation by parsing ~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonl usage fields and applying per-token pricing — but that only covers Claude Code traffic, ignores SDK / MCP / direct API traffic, and drifts from reality. The org itself knows the real number.

Proposed solutions (either works)

Option A — statusLine stdin enrichment
Add an optional field to the JSON Claude Code pipes to statusLine commands:

{
  \"model\": { ... },
  \"rate_limits\": { ... },
  \"organization\": {
    \"credit_balance_usd\": 27.43,
    \"auto_recharge_enabled\": false
  }
}

This is the minimum-friction fix — every existing statusLine script can opt in.

Option B — Public Admin API endpoint
Expose GET /v1/organizations/me/balance (or similar) returning current credit balance + auto-recharge state. Then anyone (statusLine, dashboards, CI cost gates) can query it directly with their Admin API key.

Option A is enough for most users; Option B is the more general fix.

Acceptance

• Some way for a script to read "USD remaining in this account, right now" without scraping the console.

[vfmatzkin]

+1. As a workaround I built a statusline script that tracks cost per session using the cost fields already in the JSON (total_cost_usd, total_api_duration_ms, total_lines_added, etc.). It persists each session's cost to disk and sums them against a configurable budget, so you get something like $232/300 in the status bar (plus the chat metrics before that)

Of course It's not a real balance, it only sees Claude Code traffic and drifts from the actual account, but it's meant to catch runaway sessions before they burn through everything. Repo: https://github.com/vfmatzkin/claude-statusline

[arpan-ghosh]

Made this the other day and prevents me from having to keep a browser window open and frantically refreshing. Not low-friction though, and is essentially calling non-official public endpoints and "scraping"/parsing values: https://github.com/arpan-ghosh/claude-spend-pulse

Feel free to give this a shot for the time being, until an official API endpoint is stood up (if ever).

[github-actions]

Closing for now — inactive for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still relevant.