System What macOS leaves behind
- Application Caches
- Sandboxed App Caches
- Application Logs
- Crash & Diagnostic Reports
- Saved Application State
- Trash
- Quick Look Thumbnails
- Temporary Files
- Downloaded Software Updates
- System Logs
macOS cleaner · Disk analyzer · Uninstaller
Deep clean
for macOS.
GobyStation finds and removes the data macOS and your apps leave behind, maps what is actually filling your disk, and gives you a handle on the apps, background jobs and processes running on your Mac — behind an interface of black glass and starlight rather than a control panel.
Cleanup preselects only Safe items
and Duplicates always keeps one copy
and Duplicates always keeps one copy
Move to Trash by default
put back until you empty it
put back until you empty it
Nothing leaves your Mac
scans never call out
scans never call out
- 29Cleanup categories, each with a risk level
- 9Decks in the direct download — eight in the Mac App Store edition, which has no Maintenance
- 29Developer caches it knows by name, each with its own rating
- 8Themes, two of them the icon's own glass
Nine decks, one station — eight in the App Store edition
Everything the disk is hiding, one panel each.
Every feature is called what it is. The glass, the wiper and the stars carry the character; the panels do the work.
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Dashboard System overview
Live CPU, memory and disk vitals — down to swap, battery and thermals — a one-click scan, how much you have reclaimed all-time, and what to look at next.
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Cleanup Find and remove junk
Twenty-nine categories of removable data, each explained, each with a risk level.
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Disk Analyzer See what fills the disk
A full disk map: squarified treemap, sunburst, browsable tree, and composition by file type.
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Large Files Big and forgotten files
The largest files, and the ones nobody has touched in months.
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Duplicates Identical copies
Identical files, verified byte for byte — the same bytes, not just the same name. Every group keeps a copy, and copies inside folders a program manages are never ticked for you.
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Applications Installed apps
Every installed app: size, last opened, architecture — and an uninstall that lists the leftovers it found and takes the ones you leave ticked.
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Startup Items Login items & daemons
Login items, launch agents and daemons. In the direct download agents and daemons each have a switch and any of them can be removed; the Mac App Store edition shows launch agents and daemons without changing them.
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Processes Running processes
The process table, live. The direct download can quit or force-quit from it; the Mac App Store edition shows it and quits nothing.
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Maintenance Repair and housekeeping
DNS flush, memory purge, Spotlight reindex, permission repair and other one-shot jobs — each says exactly what it does, and what cannot be undone, before you run it. Direct download only: the Mac App Store sandbox forbids them.
Cleanup · Find and remove junk
Twenty-nine kinds of junk, each explained.
Every category says what it is, why it is safe — or not — to remove, and what happens afterwards. Only items rated Safe are ever preselected, and not all of those: anything costly to rebuild, in use right now or holding a sign-in is raised to Review and left for you. Review and Caution items are always yours to tick.
- SafeCaches that rebuild themselves, and old logs, crash reports and downloads abandoned a week ago. Preselected, unless rebuilding would take hours.
- ReviewAlmost certainly junk, but look at the list first.
- CautionYours, not the system's. Never preselected.
Applications Data apps keep for themselves
- Mail Attachments
- iPhone & iPad Backups
- iOS Update Files
- macOS Installers
- Autosave Scratch Files
Internet Left over from browsing
- Browser Caches Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi, Opera, Zen, Orion
- Browser Service Workers
Developer Build output and toolchain caches
- Toolchain & Package Caches
- Xcode Archives
- Derived Data, per project
- Stale node_modules in projects untouched for 90 days
- Unavailable Simulators
- Test-Run Preferences
Leftovers From apps that are gone
- Files From Deleted Apps support folders, preferences, containers
- Broken Login Items
Downloads & Media What piled up
- Finished Installers
- Unpacked Archives
- Old Screenshots
- Interrupted Downloads
Developer · The single biggest win on a developer's Mac
Twenty-nine build-tool caches, known by name.
Most of them re-download on demand and are rated Safe. The ones that take hours to rebuild — derived data, device support, pnpm, Gradle, Maven and a few more — are rated Review, and downloaded model weights are Caution, so none of those is preselected. Xcode archives are a category of their own, rated Caution: they cannot be downloaded again.
Safety
“A cleaner that removes the wrong thing is worse than no cleaner.”
Three rules carry that weight, and the app is built so that none of them can be stepped around.
Checked again at the last moment
The list you confirm was checked against the safety guard when it was built, and every item is checked again just before it is removed — the path as given, and the place it really leads to. When the root helper does the work, it checks every path once more on its own side.
Explicit permission, not implicit trust
The guard works from allow-lists, not deny-lists. A path must sit inside a folder allowed for that kind of removal, must not be inside a protected tree, and must not itself be structural. Because /var, /tmp and /etc are symlinks into /private, every check runs against both spellings.
Reversible by default
The default is Move to Trash. Permanent deletion is available, clearly labelled, and requires a second explicit acknowledgement. Anything already in a Trash is erased whatever the mode, and the confirmation says so. Confirmation sheets list every entry, the risk breakdown and the byte count before anything happens — and a refusal by the guard is reported, never silently skipped. Every confirmed removal is then written to a local, append-only record: when it ran, the confirmation you were shown, the mode, and the exact paths removed, failed and refused.
What the guard refuses
Some places the guard will not enter whatever the mode and whoever asks — the root helper included.
Two Cleanup categories are named exceptions, and say so: Old Screenshots lists screenshots older than a month where macOS saves them — usually the Desktop — and Stale node_modules looks for dependency folders in your project folders, Documents and Desktop included. Both are rated below Safe and never preselected.
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It will not make your cloud provider download your files.
Folders in iCloud Drive and other cloud providers are measured by what is actually stored on this Mac. A file that lives only in the cloud counts as nothing and is never downloaded, so a survey cannot turn into 200 GB of traffic. Other disks and network shares are shown, not entered.
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It will not hang on a dead mount.
Every bulk filesystem walk runs on a supervised thread pool that notices a worker has stopped making progress, writes the path off, and carries on. Anything skipped is named in the interface, so the totals are never quietly wrong.
Done231 items removed · in 12.4 s
38.4GBmoved to the Trash
100%
What was removed is in the Trash.
The other decks
Built for the rest of the job, too.
The same panels, the same honesty about what is known and what is not — applied to the disk, the apps, the things that start themselves, and the things that are running right now.
Squarified treemap, a sunburst, a browsable tree, and composition by file type. Cloud folders are measured by what is on this Mac, never downloaded.
- XcXcode v26.0 · opened 1 mo ago4.31 GB
- DoDocker v4.87 · opened 2 mo ago2.30 GB
- BlBlender v5.2 248 d idle950 MB
- FiFigma v125.6 · opened 3 d ago480 MB
- ZoZoom v6.4 310 d idle290 MB
Blender — you have not opened this in 248 days.
ShowUninstall
Uninstall removes the app together with the 412 MB of caches, preferences and support files it has accumulated — or keeps the app and clears only those.
Size, version, architecture and last opened. Idle apps are flagged, and uninstalling takes the leftovers with it.
User agent Runs when you log in, as you.
- Docker Desktop helper~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.docker.helper.plistrunning
- Software updater~/Library/LaunchAgents/updater.plist
- Creative suite launcher~/Library/LaunchAgents/launcher.plist
Global daemon Runs at boot, as root, before login.
- Backup agent/Library/LaunchDaemons/backup.plistadmin
- VPN tunnel service/Library/LaunchDaemons/tunnel.plistkeepalive
Login items, launch agents and daemons. In the direct download each agent and daemon has a switch — anything outside your home folder goes through the helper or macOS's own administrator prompt — and login items can be removed. The Mac App Store edition shows launch agents and daemons and leaves the switching to System Settings.
CPU12.4%user 8.1 · system 4.3
Memory15.7 of 24 GB
- app 9.8 GB
- wired 3.6 GB
- compressed 2.3 GB
- free 8.3 GB
| Process | PID | Memory | CPU |
|---|---|---|---|
| GobyStation/Applications/GobyStation.app | 1 265 | 301 MB | 0.6 |
| Safari/Applications/Safari.app | 812 | 1.21 GB | 4.2 |
| WindowServer/System/Library/…/WindowServer | 171 | 612 MB | 3.8 |
| Xcode/Applications/Xcode.app | 1 104 | 2.33 GB | 2.1 |
| kernel_taskmacOS | 0 | 1.80 GB | 1.9 |
The process table, refreshing every two seconds while you watch it, with quit — and force-quit in the direct download. The Mac App Store edition shows the table and quits nothing. System processes are listed too; one switch hides them.
Design
Drawn, not decorated.
Everything is drawn procedurally. The default background is the icon's glass at window size: a faint ruled grid, a diagonal reflection, and four-point stars with a cyan halo. The grid, the light and the reflection are drawn once; only the stars move, twinkling in place. The six water themes keep the animated ocean — caustics, light shafts, marine snow and a bubble curtain on a single clock. Either one plays for a few seconds when the window comes forward, then settles and holds still, and it darkens as you move to deeper decks.
The theme lives in the visuals, not the vocabulary. Every feature is called what it is — Cleanup, Disk Analyzer, Startup Items — while the glass, the wiper and the stars carry the character. The same glass you are looking at right now, in fact.
On the cost of all that
An animated background is easy to write and easy to make expensive. The first working version idled at 67% of a core. Almost none of that came from drawing — it came from layout — and fixing it is what makes the animation affordable.
- 18%of one core while the scene plays
- 6%with motion turned off
- 0%in the background: the scene stops, and vitals are sampled every 30 seconds
Motion can be set to Reduced or Off in Settings. Those settings remove the clocks rather than hiding the layers, so turning motion down actually costs less.
Eight themes
Station and Silver take their colours from the icon: its black glass, starlight and cyan edge, and the Dock tile's brushed silver for daylight. Auto follows macOS: Silver in Light, Station in Dark. The six water themes differ in depth, temperature and light.
Station
Black glass, starlight and a cyan edge — the icon's own colours.
Silver
Brushed silver and pale glass, for bright rooms and daylight.
Abyss
Deep teal and bioluminescent cyan. The original.
Coral Reef
Warm shallows — coral, turquoise and sunlight.
Kelp Forest
Green water and amber light under a canopy.
Arctic
Pale ice-blue, cold and very quiet.
Midnight
Almost black, with violet running lights.
Tidepool
A light theme, for bright rooms and daylight.
The optional assistant
An assistant you switch on — not one that watches.
GobyStation can ask a language model what an unfamiliar file is, whether removing it is risky, or what a process belongs to. It is the only part of the app that talks to anything outside the machine, so a few rules shape it.
- Off until you switch it on. Scans never call out. Asking opens a panel with the exact text that would be sent and where it would go; nothing leaves until you press Send, and an answer given before is shown again without sending anything.
- Names and metadata only. Names, paths (your home folder written as ~), sizes, dates, versions and identifiers such as bundle IDs leave the Mac; file contents never do. A cleanup selection sends its 40 largest entries and only counts the rest.
- Your key, your file. If you bring your own key it is kept in a file only your account can read, in the app's own support folder — not the Keychain — and it is sent only to the provider it was saved for.
- Your provider, your key. Point it at Anthropic, at anything speaking the OpenAI chat shape, or at a model running on this Mac — where no key is needed at all. GobyStation runs no service of its own, so nothing you ask ever reaches us.
An answer is presented as what it is: a language model's opinion, not a check GobyStation performed. Where a list is capped, it says it is capped rather than printing the cap as a total. The safety guard still governs everything that is actually removed.
Permissions
Asked for plainly.
GobyStation comes in two editions. The direct download is unsandboxed: it reads and removes files as you, and asks for an administrator only for work outside your home folder. The Mac App Store edition is sandboxed, and asks you once to choose Macintosh HD so it can see the folders it cleans. Either way, a user agreement and privacy statement are shown on first launch and accepted before it does anything at all.
One permission GobyStation can usemacOS grants it by hand, in System Settings. GobyStation will not ask again.
Full Disk AccessWithout it macOS hides parts of your Library, so scans under-report.Grant
It is not required. Without it GobyStation sees less of the disk, and macOS may ask on its own before GobyStation looks in Desktop, Documents, Downloads or other apps' data.
You can change this later in Settings.No ThanksDone
- Full Disk Access has no request API, so the app opens the right pane and floats its own icon for you to drag into the list — then notices on its own when you did, and offers Quit & Reopen if macOS needs the restart. Without it, scans see less and say so plainly.
- Administrator rights, in the direct download, are asked for by macOS itself, through the standard prompt, and only for work outside your home folder — a system log, a global daemon, a maintenance job. A scan never asks for a password, and never installs anything.
- A helper for the repetitive part. In the direct download, the first uninstall that needs an administrator installs a small privileged helper; after that, removing apps and startup jobs outside your home folder, and switching daemons, stop prompting. System logs and maintenance jobs still ask every time. The helper answers only administrator accounts, acts only on the asking account's own home, checks every path again on the root side, refuses any job under
com.apple.and its own, and otherwise only reads that account's login-item records. Settings can remove it. - The Mac App Store edition has no administrator path at all — no helper and no password prompt. So it has no Maintenance deck, shows launch agents and daemons without switching them, quits no processes, leaves out of its cleanup lists anything that would need root, and refuses — with the reason — an uninstall that would need it.
Pricing
Free to keep. Pay for the parts that cost something.
The station is free. A subscription adds the assistant and the advanced features; a lifetime license buys them once. Everything marked Undetermined is a placeholder — the structure is settled, the numbers are not.
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Free The station
Freefor everyone, always
The cleaner, the disk map, the safety guard and the removal record. No assistant, no advanced features.
- The core decks. Which decks stay free: Undetermined
- Move to Trash by default, the safety guard, and the removal record.
- Eight themes, six languages, and updates.
- No assistant. The assistant is a paid feature.
- No advanced features.
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Monthly Subscription
Undeterminedper month · cancel any time
A small monthly fee for the assistant and the advanced features, for as long as you keep it.
- Everything in Free.
- The assistant, with your own provider key — Anthropic, OpenAI-compatible, or a model on this Mac.
- The advanced features. Which ones: Undetermined
- Free trial: Undetermined
- Macs per subscription: Undetermined
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Lifetime One purchase
Undeterminedonce · yours for good
A bigger fee, paid once, for everything the subscription unlocks.
- Everything in Monthly, for good.
- The assistant: with your own provider key, for good.
- Major version upgrades: Undetermined
- Macs per license: Undetermined
| What you get | Free | Monthly | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|---|
| The decks — nine in the direct download, eight in the App Store edition; which stay free is undetermined, one decision each | |||
| Dashboard | Undetermined | ||
| Cleanup | Undetermined | ||
| Disk Analyzer | Undetermined | ||
| Large Files | Undetermined | ||
| Duplicates | Undetermined | ||
| Applications | Undetermined | ||
| Startup Items | Undetermined | ||
| Processes | Undetermined | ||
| Maintenance Direct download only | Undetermined | ||
| The assistant | |||
| The assistant, with your own provider key Anthropic, OpenAI-compatible, or a local model. Your provider bills you for what it answers. | |||
| Advanced features — undetermined | |||
| Undetermined Advanced feature, to be named | |||
| Undetermined Advanced feature, to be named | |||
| Undetermined Advanced feature, to be named | |||
| Terms | |||
| Price | Free | Undetermined / month | Undetermined , once |
| Currency and regional pricing | — | Undetermined | Undetermined |
| Free trial | — | Undetermined | — |
| Macs per license | Any | Undetermined | Undetermined |
| Updates | while subscribed | Undetermined minor always; major versions open | |
| Where to buy This site, the Mac App Store, or both | — | Undetermined | Undetermined |
| Refunds | — | Undetermined | Undetermined |
Prices, trial, refund terms and the list of advanced features are placeholders while the plan is decided. Nothing on this section is for sale yet.
Surfacing soon
Coming soon to the Mac App Store.
GobyStation is being prepared for the App Store. Requires macOS 14 or later, and runs natively on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs.
Coming soon on the Mac App Store
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