🦉 night-owl

A Claude Code plugin that notices when you're coding at night and charges you for it.

Every message you send to Claude Code between 12:30 AM and 5 AM local time gets logged. The first message of each night adds $5 to your tab — one charge per night, no matter how many messages you send before sunrise.

 🦉  NIGHT OWL LEDGER
 ---------------------------------------------
   Owed          $15.00
   Late nights   3  (at $5.00 each)
   Messages      9 sent inside the window
   First time    2026-08-02
   Most recent   2026-08-15
   Worst night   2026-08-15  (5 messages, 12:33 AM - 4:52 AM)

   Recent nights
     2026-08-15    5 msgs   12:33 AM - 4:52 AM
     2026-08-09    1 msg    2:03 AM
     2026-08-02    3 msgs   12:41 AM - 3:22 AM

Install

Type these inside Claude Code (desktop app, terminal, or IDE — anywhere you can send a message):

/plugin marketplace add destevae/night-owl
/plugin install night-owl@night-owl-marketplace

If you don't have SSH keys set up with GitHub, use the full HTTPS URL instead — the owner/repo shorthand clones over SSH by default:

/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/destevae/night-owl.git

Then restart Claude Code, or run /reload-plugins.

Checking your tab

Where	What to run
In Claude Code	/night-owl:tab
In Claude Code	Just ask: "how much do I owe the night owl?"
Any terminal	~/.claude/night-owl/nights.log is plain text — see below

The plugin's bin/ directory is on the PATH of Claude Code's Bash tool while the plugin is enabled, so Claude can run night-owl report for you on request.

From your own shell, without needing the plugin path:

awk '{if(!($1 in c))n++; c[$1]++} END{printf "$%d owed across %d late nights (%d messages)\n", n*5, n, NR}' ~/.claude/night-owl/nights.log

The first late-night message each night also pops a one-line notice in your session:

🦉 Night owl tax: +$5.00 for 2026-08-15. You now owe $25.00 across 5 late nights.

After that the plugin stays quiet for the rest of the night.

Commands

Command	What it does
/night-owl:tab	Show the ledger and what you owe
/night-owl:reset	Archive the ledger and start over at $0

How it works

A UserPromptSubmit hook runs scripts/night-owl.sh track every time you send a message. The script checks the local clock, and if you're inside the window it appends a line to a plain-text ledger:

~/.claude/night-owl/nights.log

2026-08-15 00:33:00
2026-08-15 01:01:00

Money owed is just number of distinct dates in that file x $5, so the ledger is easy to audit, edit, or delete by hand. The hook never blocks or delays your prompt — it exits 0 no matter what happens, and outside the window it does nothing at all.

Config

Set these as environment variables (for example in ~/.claude/settings.json under "env"):

Variable	Default	Meaning
NIGHT_OWL_START	0030	Window opens, HHMM local time
NIGHT_OWL_END	0500	Window closes, HHMM local time
NIGHT_OWL_RATE	5	Dollars per offending night
NIGHT_OWL_DATA_DIR	~/.claude/night-owl	Where the ledger lives
NIGHT_OWL_QUIET	unset	Set to 1 to track silently, no in-chat notice

Windows that wrap past midnight work too — NIGHT_OWL_START=2300 with NIGHT_OWL_END=0500 bills you for anything after 11 PM.

Development

Test without installing:

claude --plugin-dir /path/to/night-owl

Validate the manifests — run this from inside the night-owl directory:

/plugin validate .

Publishing

This repo is its own marketplace: .claude-plugin/marketplace.json lists one plugin whose source is ./, the repo root. Push it to GitHub and it's installable.

cd night-owl
git init
git add -A
git commit -m "night-owl: bill yourself $5 a night for late-night Claude Code"
gh repo create night-owl --public --source=. --push

Shipping an update: bump version in .claude-plugin/plugin.json, then commit and push. Claude Code only pulls a new copy when that version changes. Users pick it up with:

/plugin marketplace update night-owl-marketplace
/plugin update night-owl@night-owl-marketplace