Dollar Desktop Pet

Fast is great — until it breaks something

AI coding tools can edit files, run commands, and automate whole tasks. That speed is real, and so are the blind spots: a recursive delete runs the moment it is generated, with no second look. One bad edit with no snapshot is just gone. What it cost shows up when the bill does.

Dollar is the local layer that sits next to all of that.

Three things Dollar does

Seatbelt — risky actions ask first. Dollar holds dangerous commands until you say go. Quiet on the safe stuff, firm on the risky stuff.

Dashcam — see what your AI did. A local activity history of flagged actions, approvals and changes, so you can look back instead of guessing.

Black box — recover when it goes wrong. An encrypted local snapshot is taken before risky changes, so a bad task is one rollback away, not a late-night cleanup.

Works without AI

No account, no API key, no Git required. These work the moment you open it:

• Restore points (the vault) — snapshot a folder, roll it back in one click.
• Secret scanning — find exposed keys before you commit or share. Results are masked.
• One-click checkup — one pass over agent connections, secret scan, project checks and recovery coverage. Produces one shareable card, and exports a report. Read-only throughout.
• Safety range — see a command's local risk rating (red / yellow / green). Nothing is ever run.
• Machine performance and local spend — the readouts you actually reach for.
• A desktop pet — draggable, pettable, with gentle notifications. A guardrail you can see is a guardrail you use: Dollar sits on your desktop, not in a background process you forget you installed.

Optional: connect the AI coding agent you already use

If you have a compatible AI coding agent installed, connect it in one click — no commands to copy — and Dollar supervises it live: a heads-up before risky actions, an automatic restore point, and a running tally of what it spends. This layer is optional and separate from the local tools above.

The ledger drills down by agent, model and month. Each agent reports activity in its own unit (Claude counts messages, Codex counts sessions), and anything with no records shows "—", not 0.

And when you switch agents, switch machines, or a service is temporarily down, the Escape Pod exports a continuity pack you review first — redacted, metadata-only, handed over as a local file. No vendor has to be online.

One-time purchase

$2.99, once. Windows and macOS are both included. No subscription, no account, no Pro tier.

Privacy

Everything runs locally. Zero telemetry, and your project contents are never uploaded. Dollar contains no AI of its own, and its core features need no API key.