An Ethereum gas tracker in your menu bar — with Bitcoin fees beside it.
What it costs to transact right now: Ethereum gas in gwei with the estimated cost of a transfer, an ERC-20 token or a swap, and Bitcoin fees in sat/vB by priority. Public nodes, no API key, no wallet connection — one keystroke instead of a site full of ads.
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Gwei is a number. “What will this cost me” is the question.
Knowing gas is at 14 gwei only helps if you can turn it into money, so the widget does that step for you. It multiplies the live gas price by the standard gas amount of the three things people actually do — a plain ETH transfer, an ERC-20 token transfer, and a swap on a DEX — and shows the estimated cost of each. Next to the gwei figure there is a cheap / normal / expensive label, so you get the verdict before you get the arithmetic.
Bitcoin gets the same treatment in its own units: the fee recommendations by priority — fast, about thirty minutes, about an hour, economy, minimum — in sat/vB, each with what it works out to for a typical transaction. A timestamp tells you how fresh the reading is, and Refresh gets a new one.
- Ethereum: gwei + estimated cost of transfer / ERC-20 / swap
- Bitcoin: sat/vB across five priority tiers + cost of a typical tx
- Cheap / normal / expensive traffic light on the gas price
- “Updated HH:MM” so you always know how old the number is
- Your AI assistant can read the current fees through the local MCP server
Estimated, with the assumptions written down.
There is no way to know in advance what your transaction will cost, because that depends on the contract it touches. What is knowable is the current price of gas and the typical amount each kind of operation consumes — so the widget states both instead of implying precision it doesn’t have.
The gas amounts it uses: 21,000 for a plain ETH transfer, which the protocol fixes exactly; 65,000 for a typical ERC-20 transfer; and 150,000 for a typical swap. On Bitcoin the reference transaction is 141 vBytes — a standard SegWit spend with one input and two outputs. Those are conventions, and the widget says so on screen rather than in the fine print.
The same honesty applies to freshness. Because there is no polling, the number you are looking at is from the last time you opened or refreshed the widget, and the timestamp shows exactly when that was. Gas can move a lot in a minute; a stale number presented as live would be worse than no number.
- Standard gas units: 21,000 / 65,000 / 150,000
- Bitcoin reference: a 141-vByte typical transaction
- Estimate disclaimer visible in the widget, not buried
- Not financial advice — public network conditions, plus arithmetic
Two public endpoints, no key, and nothing about you.
Ethereum gas comes from a public RPC node — you can pick between two verified providers in the widget’s settings, so if one starts failing you switch instead of waiting. Bitcoin fees come from mempool.space. Both are queried without an API key and without an account, and the request is made by the app’s native layer rather than a browser, so there is no CORS proxy in the middle.
What is not sent: no address, no wallet, no portfolio, no identifier. The widget asks two public questions — what is gas, what are fees — and displays the answers. Compare that to a gas-tracker website, which loads ads and analytics alongside the number you came for.
- Switchable public Ethereum RPC · mempool.space for Bitcoin
- No key, no account, no addresses, no tracking
- Requests made natively by the app, not through a browser
- Clear error state with Retry when a node is unreachable
Installed from the catalog, in one click.
Network Fees isn’t bundled into the app — it’s a widget in the Webstarted Toolbox catalog. Download Toolbox, open the catalog tab (🧰), press the “+” next to Network Fees, and it lands in your Finance tab. No reinstall, no app update. Here are a few of its neighbors:
Questions, answered.
Does it refresh automatically?
No, and that is on purpose. It queries when the widget becomes visible and whenever you press Refresh — there is no background polling. The data comes from free public nodes offered as a courtesy; hammering them every few seconds from every installed copy is how that courtesy gets withdrawn. In practice you open the popover right before you are about to transact, which is exactly when the number matters.
Are the costs per operation exact?
No — they are estimates, and the widget labels them as such. Ethereum costs are computed from the live gas price times a standard gas amount for each operation: 21,000 for a plain ETH transfer (that one is fixed by the protocol), 65,000 for a typical ERC-20 token transfer, and 150,000 for a typical DEX swap. Your actual transaction depends on the contract you are calling and can be higher or lower. On the Bitcoin side, the reference is a typical 141-vByte SegWit transaction with one input and two outputs.
Do I need an API key or an account?
Neither. Ethereum gas comes from a public RPC endpoint and Bitcoin fees from mempool.space, both without keys. You can switch the Ethereum RPC in the widget’s settings between two verified public providers, which is useful when one of them is having a bad day.
Does it connect to my wallet?
No. It never asks for an address, a seed phrase or a wallet connection, and it cannot sign or send anything. All it does is read two public numbers — the current gas price and the current fee recommendations — the same numbers anyone can query. There is nothing linking the reading to you beyond the request itself.
What does the cheap / normal / expensive label mean?
It is a quick traffic light on the gwei figure so you do not have to remember what a normal gas price looks like. It answers “is now a bad moment?” at a glance — the kind of judgement you would otherwise make by opening a gas site, waiting for its ads to load, and squinting at a chart.
Is this financial advice?
No. It reports public network conditions and does arithmetic on them. Nothing here is a recommendation to transact, to wait, or to buy or sell anything, and the numbers can move between the moment you read them and the moment you press send.
Is it free?
Yes. Webstarted Toolbox is free and needs no account, and Network Fees is a free widget in its catalog — you install it in one click from inside the app.
Get Webstarted Toolbox
Free to use. Download the app, then add Network Fees from the catalog in one click. macOS 12+ and Windows 10+.
One icon, many small tools
This is just one of the widgets in Webstarted Toolbox. Here are the rest: