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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Understand and reduce token usage with ContextSpy context profiler

Most devs using AI coding tools don't even imagine how much information they put in the context window - tools, MCPs, tool responses, active skills - all of which take up some real estate. Sometimes updating a tool description or trimming api response can give significant savings - and profiler helps to measure that

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    We built an open-source proxy that sits between coding agents (Claude Code, OpenClaw, etc.) and the LLM, compressing tool outputs before they enter the context window. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vFZ6MPrwjw#t=9s. Motivation: Agents are terrible at managing context. A single file read or grep can dump thousands of tokens into the window, most of it noise. This isn't just expensive — it actively degrades quality. Long-context benchmarks consistently show steep accuracy drops as context grows (OpenAI's GPT-5.4 eval goes from 97.2% at 32k to 36.6% at 1M…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hello, My name is Yahia, I've been working on scraping products for a long time and maintain a couple of free sites in my spare time (E.g. knifegeek.io) What prompted this is i've rebuilt scraping infra at every company I've started and finally just made it a product. Pass a URL, get clean markdown, html, images, sitemap or pass a domain, get logos, colors, socials, industry data. Goal is to offer a better service than VC funded competitors at a fraction of the cost. Stealth is included and automatic at no additional cost (normally an upcharge by alternatives). Would love your honest thoughts.

    Jul 2026 · context.dev · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Reusable AI Memory for Smarter Prompts Anywhere

    Nov 2025 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Persistent memory for AI coding agents

    Apr 2026 · contextpool.io · its alternatives →

  5. 5IB

    I released ContextChat, an AI chat designed to be context-centric, helping you stay focused and productive by giving you control over the information your AI sees. You can import websites, files, and public/private GitHub repos to give the AI full knowledge of your projects. Unlike other chatbots, ContextChat lets you easily switch between project contexts, so you get relevant answers and avoid the noise. It's pay-per-use, giving you flexibility and control over costs and free models are available so you can try it for free with no monthly subscriptions. Let me know your feedback!

    2025 · contextch.at · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Your AI agent is burning 6x more tokens than it needs to just to browse the web. We built OpenBrowser MCP to fix that. Most browser MCPs give the LLM dozens of tools: click, scroll, type, extract, navigate. Each call dumps the entire page accessibility tree into the context window. One Wikipedia page? 124K+ tokens. Every. Single. Call. OpenBrowser works differently. It exposes one tool. Your agent writes Python code, and OpenBrowser executes it in a persistent runtime with full browser access. The agent controls what comes back. No bloated page dumps. No wasted tokens. Just the data your…

    Apr 2026 · openbrowser.me · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Small codebases were always a good thing. With coding agents, there's now a huge advantage to having a codebase small enough that an agent can hold the full thing in context. Repo Tokens is a GitHub Action that counts your codebase's size in tokens (using tiktoken) and updates a badge in your README. The badge color reflects what percentage of an LLM's context window the codebase fills: green for under 30%, yellow for 50-70%, red for 70%+. Context window size is configurable and defaults to 200k (size of Claude models). It's a composite action. Installs tiktoken, runs ~60 lines of inline…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Count tokens and estimate costs for any AI model

    2024 · tokencounter.co · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    I built a small Chrome extension for people who write long conversations in Claude and don’t want to unexpectedly hit the 200,000-token limit. Context Compass automatically counts words and estimates token usage as you write. It updates in real time, gives you a visible percentage bar, and helps power users manage sprawling chats without losing work or flow. I built it because I kept getting the “max context” error and realized there was no way to track usage in Claude. No signups, no tracking, just a simple install. Would love any feedback or ideas for improvements. Thanks!

    2025 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    I've been presenting at local meetups about Context Engineering, RAG, Skills, etc.. I even have a vbrownbag coming up on LinkedIn about this topic so I figured I would make a basic example that uses bedrock so I can use it in my talks or vbrownbags. Hopefully it's useful.

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Smart task-driven LLM context optimizer

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    An open-source MCP plugin (300,000+ developers) and a commercial Platform that builds Solutions on top. context-mode keeps raw data out of the LLM context window. Insight surfaces what your team is doing with the saved tokens.

    Jun 2026 · context-mode.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Calculate LLM tokens & costs before you send

    Jan 2026 · context-budget-planner-qyosh00ed-thibauds-projects-31e2cfb7.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    See how much Claude you have left before you hit the wall

    May 2026 · tokenmonitor.app · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Make Your Website Instantly Understandable to AI

    2025 · contextkit.io · its alternatives →

  16. 16AS

    We explored a novel method to gauge the significance of tokens in prompts given to large language models, without needing direct model access. Essentially, we just did an ablation study on the prompt using cosine similarity of the embeddings as the measure. We got surprisingly promising results when comparing this really simple approach to integrated gradients. Curious to hear thoughts from the community!

    2023 · heatmap.demos.watchful.io · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi HN, I'm building Librarian (https://uselibrarian.dev/), an open-source (MIT) context management tool that stops AI agents from burning tokens by blindly re-reading their entire conversation history on every turn. The Problem: If you're building agentic loops in frameworks like LangGraph or OpenClaw, you hit two walls fast: Financial Cost: Token usage scales quadratically over long conversations. Passing the whole history every time gets incredibly expensive. Context Rot: As the context window fills up, the LLM suffers from the "Lost in the Middle" effect. Response latency…

    Feb 2026 · uselibrarian.dev · its alternatives →

  18. 18MM

    I built MCPlexor to solve a token waste problem I kept running into with MCP-based agents. The Problem: MCP (Model Context Protocol) is great for giving LLMs access to external tools. But if you connect multiple servers (GitHub, Linear, Postgres, Slack), you end up with 40-50k tokens of tool definitions injected into every request – before the agent even does anything. On a 200k context model, that's 25% gone. On smaller models, it's worse. And most runs only use 1-2 tools. The Solution: MCPlexor sits between your agent and your MCP servers. Instead of loading all tool definitions upfront:…

    Feb 2026 · mcplexor.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Stop wasting tokens. Write smarter AI prompts with context

    May 2026 · contextra.xyz · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    The debugging and UI copy tool that actually saves tokens

    May 2026 · contextsnip.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hey HN - there are lots of tools to understand how many tokens you use and how much it costs, but we haven't found any that tell you where those tokens are going! Decant helps you understand what you are spending tokens on (context gathering, planning, code, chat, etc), so you can optimize it.

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Web tool to slice codebase clutter & save 50%+ on LLM tokens

    Jun 2026 · polar.sh · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Helps teams notice repeated AI usage before token get usedup

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    I use multiple AI tools for work and also my side projects, and the annoying part was to track my costs and token usage across tools. Everytime I had to visit each tool and its respective usage setting to check it and I was losing patience and also was getting hit by surprise limits Now I know that there are already free/open-source trackers for Cursor or Claude usage, and they are useful if that is all you need. My problem is broader as I wanted one small place to see tokens, spend, subscriptions and limits across the AI tools I actually use. I was really tired of switching tabs and…

    Jul 2026 · lifehacksgermany.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →