Hi Sumo-lings,

I'm Garm, founder of Extra Headroom, the menu bar app that cuts AI coding token usage by up to 50%.

This all started when I wanted to install a new python package called Headroom on my machine, but struggled to do so. After an afternoon of fighting with it, I asked the creator to make a simple app that I could just install by double clicking. He said he wasn't going to do that, but that I should, and that I should use the same Headroom name to put it in the same family. I shipped version 1 on April 1st to make it easier for everyone to run Headroom. Over time, we expanded with many other features and addons.

Here's the problem it solves. When you use Claude Code or ChatGPT / Codex, most of what gets sent isn't your code or your question. It's tool output, logs, JSON blobs, and file dumps the model has already seen, resent in full on every single turn. You pay for all of it.

Headroom is a menu bar app for macOS and Windows. It runs locally, sits between your coding client and the API, and compresses that boilerplate on the way out. Nothing is lost: when the model needs the original, it pulls it back on demand. You change nothing about how you work.

Typical coding sessions come out 25-50% lighter. Noisy ones do much better: 92% reduction on code search, 73% on GitHub issue triage. On a good day that's roughly twice the usage on the plan you already pay for.

I'm excited to launch on AppSumo to learn from the community what else we can add to the app to further improve it.

I'll be closely monitoring the comments and improving the app every day. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Garm