Providers

Claude Code and Codex are providers. A provider is the unit BlackFlare turns on and off: enabling one gives you its menu section, its usage numbers, and its notifications; disabling it stops all three at once.

Detection and the master toggle

On every launch BlackFlare checks whether ~/.claude and ~/.codex exist and seeds each provider’s enabled state from that. Detection only ever fills in a state you have not set. Once you toggle a provider by hand, detection stops overriding you — install or remove a CLI afterwards and your choice stands.

Manage them in Settings… → Providers. Each enabled provider shows:

its Binary path, probed from the usual install locations (no shell is launched to find it)
its Config directory
any custom model IDs you have added
for Claude, the models.dev catalog source and a Refresh button

A disabled provider collapses to a single toggle.

The switch tab

When both providers are enabled, the menu shows a Claude | Codex capsule at the top (Claude first) and everything below it follows the selection — including the percentage next to the menu bar icon. With one provider enabled there is no tab, because there is nothing to switch between. With none, the menu points you at Settings → Providers.

Under the tab sits a header with the provider name, an “Updated Xm ago” timestamp, and a plan badge:

Claude — 20x / 5x / Pro / Free, taken from the rate-limit tier in Claude Code’s own cached profile at ~/.claude.json, read-only. The usage endpoint and claude auth status only report a tier-less “max”, which is why the cached profile is the source.
Codex — plan_type from its rollout files.

If the plan can’t be determined, the badge is hidden rather than guessed.

What each feature covers

The three features reach different sets of sessions:

Usage tracking covers everything. Session and weekly limits are account-wide, so all your Claude and Codex usage counts — CLI, IDE, desktop apps, web, and remote sessions alike.
Notifications and keep-awake cover local sessions. Every Claude Code and Codex session running on your Mac is watched: CLI, IDE extensions, and local sessions in the Claude and ChatGPT desktop apps. Remote sessions are stored off your machine, so there is nothing local to watch.
Switching defaults covers Claude Code (CLI and IDE extensions) and the Codex CLI. The Claude desktop app, the Codex IDE extension, and the ChatGPT desktop app store and cache their configuration in their own app-specific locations, so defaults switched here never reach them. Details in Switching models.