Your Claude extra usage balance is two endpoints, three fields, and one BLOCKED string

It is the dollar amount Anthropic has counted against your metered (pay-as-you-go) cap during the current billing month. Once your rolling 5-hour window and 7-day weekly bucket are spent, Anthropic does not stop you outright; it bills further usage against a configurable monthly credit limit, in cents, and surfaces both the spend and the limit on claude.ai/settings/usage. The 'balance' is the difference between used_credits and monthly_credit_limit. ClaudeMeter mirrors that into a single line in your menu bar.

Two endpoints on claude.ai. The first is GET /api/organizations/{org_uuid}/usage, which carries an extra_usage block with is_enabled, monthly_limit, used_credits, utilization, currency. The second is GET /api/organizations/{org_uuid}/overage_spend_limit, which carries is_enabled, monthly_credit_limit, used_credits, currency, plus three fields the first endpoint does not have: disabled_reason, disabled_until, out_of_credits. ClaudeMeter prefers the second endpoint when present because BLOCKED is only diagnosable from those three extra fields. Both numbers are in cents and divided by 100 to render dollars.

The usage endpoint includes the metered block as a sub-object so a single GET can reconstruct the whole rolling-window plus pay-as-you-go view. The overage_spend_limit endpoint is the dedicated billing-state endpoint that the Settings page uses to render the BLOCKED banner and the 'until <date>' message when an admin pauses metered billing or the cap is hit. They overlap on the dollars used and the cap; they diverge on the lockout state. ClaudeMeter calls both, in sequence, and merges them into one snapshot.

It means the JSON came back with out_of_credits = true. The user has metered billing enabled, has consumed the entire monthly_credit_limit, and Anthropic is now refusing overage-billed calls until disabled_until passes (or the user raises the cap on the Settings page). The 5-hour and 7-day bars can still look green when this happens, which is why the BLOCKED string is the harshest debugging case in the whole UI: green windows plus a BLOCKED extra-usage line means the next prompt 429s and the cause is not the rolling cap.

The fields ship in cents. used_credits and monthly_credit_limit on the overage_spend_limit response are integer cents (or for used_credits, a float of cents). format.rs line 25 does `let u = ov.used_credits.unwrap_or(0.0) / 100.0;` and line 29 does `let l = l as f64 / 100.0;`, then line 31 prints `${:.2} / ${:.2} ({:.0}%)` so the dollar sign + two-decimal format reads like a normal billing line. If you skipped the division you would see $172000.00 / $50000.00 instead of $1720.00 / $500.00 and assume the reader was hallucinating.

They do not. ccusage reads ~/.claude/projects/<project>/<session>.jsonl on disk and sums input + output tokens per turn against the official model price card. That is a faithful local-token estimate, but it cannot see the extra_usage block on claude.ai (claude.ai's pricing folds in peak-hour multipliers and per-model weights ccusage does not) and it cannot see the overage_spend_limit endpoint at all (it never makes an HTTP call to claude.ai). The extra-usage balance is server truth; ccusage measures local truth. Use both together if you want to compare the two ledgers.

Yes. Open DevTools on claude.ai/settings/usage, copy your full Cookie header, then run `curl -H 'Cookie: $YOUR_COOKIE' -H 'Referer: https://claude.ai/settings/usage' https://claude.ai/api/organizations/$ORG_UUID/overage_spend_limit`. You get back the same JSON the extension does: { is_enabled, monthly_credit_limit, used_credits, currency, out_of_credits, disabled_reason, disabled_until }. Pipe through jq and you have a one-shot view of your extra usage balance. ClaudeMeter automates the cookie wrangling, the org enumeration, and the 60-second cadence.

It does for free workspace orgs and team orgs without metered billing turned on. ClaudeMeter wraps the call in try/catch (extension/background.js line 26-27, src/api.rs lines 31-45) and falls through to the extra_usage block on the usage response if it is present, or omits the line entirely if neither endpoint hands back a balance. So if you do not see an Extra usage line in the menu bar, your org has not enabled metered billing or you are on a free tier; the absence of the line is informative, not a bug.

Because the line is laid out for monospaced terminal width: 16 characters of label, then the dollar line, then the optional status flag. format.rs line 26 hardcodes `" BLOCKED"` (two spaces, all caps) so the flag is visually offset from the percent column without needing a separate column. format.rs line 39 then prints with `{:<16}` left-padded label, so 'Extra usage' aligns with '5-hour' and '7-day' above it. It is purely cosmetic, but it is the literal string you will see in the menu bar and the CLI when out_of_credits goes hot.

Every billing cycle. The overage_spend_limit endpoint reflects the current cycle's used_credits and monthly_credit_limit; both reset on the cycle boundary the subscription_details endpoint reports as next_charge_date. ClaudeMeter does not interpolate the reset (the Settings page does not render a countdown for the metered cap), but you can see the renewal date by checking the subscription line printed under the Extra usage line in the CLI or the menu bar dropdown.

monthly_credit_limit changes on the very next poll. used_credits keeps climbing from where it was. Percent recomputes from the new cap, so a balance that was at 100 percent BLOCKED can drop back to (for example) 60 percent when you double the cap, and the BLOCKED suffix disappears within one minute on the menu-bar refresh. ClaudeMeter does not cache the cap; every 60-second poll re-reads it from the server.