Hi Sumo-lings, Garm here.

Thank you so much for a big first week!

Between Sep 28 and Oct 5, 129 of you had Headroom compressing your Claude Code and Codex traffic. Together you saved over 1.5 billion tokens, and the median buyer saved 1.3M tokens in their first 8 days.

Since then, we've also been continuously releasing new versions of the app to improve your experience.

🛠️ What shipped since launch

• Remote Control works through Headroom. Claude Code hides /remote-control when it runs through a proxy. Type /remote-control in a terminal, or /remote-control-headroom in the VS Code panel, and Headroom restarts that session without itself. This now works on Windows and Linux too.

• Crash fallback. If Headroom ever closes unexpectedly, your agents go back to connecting directly. You no longer get "Connection refused" until you reopen it.

• Usage data switch. You can turn off usage analytics and crash reports in Settings.

• Chisle add-on. A one-click install that makes Claude Code's replies shorter and trims long tool output, on top of Headroom's compression.

• Codebase Memory now installs on Windows.

• Long sessions with many screenshots now get compressed instead of timing out, and they use less CPU.

• Stability: quitting no longer freezes, add-on installs no longer lock the window, and updates are more reliable.

And as a reminder to buyers:

✅ What Headroom works with (please check before you buy)

Headroom compresses agents that run on your own computer:

• Claude Code in the terminal, and its extension in VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf and JetBrains

• ChatGPT Codex: the CLI, the IDE extension, and Codex in the ChatGPT desktop app

• OpenCode and Grok Build (beta)

• Tools that start Claude Code or Codex for you, like Conductor

It cannot reach apps that talk to the model from their own servers. That includes the Claude desktop app (Chat, Cowork and the Code tab), claude.ai, ChatGPT chat, the built-in models in Cursor and Windsurf, and cloud agents like Replit or Claude Code on the web. If that's how you work, Headroom won't save you anything yet. The full list is here: extraheadroom.com/docs/compatibility

Running Claude Code in WSL2? Install the Linux app inside WSL (Ubuntu 24.04 or newer).

💻 One license covers all your computers

A license is for one person, and you can use it on as many of your own computers as you like. Sign in with the same Headroom email on each one. You don't need a second code for your laptop.

✍️ Reviews help!

If Headroom is saving you tokens, a short review here would be very welcome! It helps others discover the joy of spending fewer tokens :-)

Garm

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