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Headroom

Headroom is a paid menu-bar and tray app for macOS, Windows and Linux that runs a local-first pipeline to reversibly compress the tool output, logs and boilerplate that fill an AI coding agent's prompts, cutting Claude Code and Codex token costs by roughly half.

Headroom

Headroom sits between an AI coding agent and the tokens it spends: it reversibly compresses the tool output, log lines and boilerplate that would otherwise bloat every prompt, so a fixed usage plan or budget covers roughly twice as much work, and the model can still recover the original content on demand when it needs it. Alongside Claude Code and Codex, it also routes OpenCode and Grok Build sessions through the same pipeline.

The desktop shell is open source under the MIT license, but running Headroom requires a Headroom account and an active paid subscription, offered with a seven-day free trial that needs no card. It installs through Homebrew on macOS or as a direct download for macOS, Windows and Linux, self-updates after the first install, and exposes a local status endpoint an AI agent can query to detect whether it is already running.

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