LighterMac for macOS and lightermac.com · last updated 15 October 2026
The app reads your disk to measure it. Your files, their names, their folders and their paths never leave your Mac. The app has no account and no sign-in. From version 1.1 it sends anonymous usage counts — what happened, never what is on your disk — which you can turn off.
The website, lightermac.com, counts visits and downloads so we know whether anyone finds it useful. That is described below, separately, because it has nothing to do with your files.
To tell you what is using space, LighterMac reads file and folder names, sizes and dates. It does not read, copy, or transmit the contents of any file. This all happens on your Mac, and the results are never sent anywhere.
If you buy Pro and activate a licence key, LighterMac sends that key to our payment provider, Dodo Payments, so it can confirm the key is genuine and record which Mac it is active on. It also sends the name of your Mac (for example “Sahana’s MacBook Pro”) so you can tell your devices apart when releasing a licence.
Once a day, LighterMac also asks lightermac.com whether a newer version exists, by fetching one public file. The request carries nothing about you: no identifier, no cookie, no version of macOS, nothing about your files. If there is an update, the app shows a link; it never updates itself.
So we can tell whether LighterMac actually helps — whether a scan finds space on a full Mac, whether clearing works, whether anyone looks at Pro — the app sends short, anonymous counts of these steps to lightermac.com, which passes them to Google Analytics. Before it sends anything, the app shows a card saying what is sent, with a Turn off button on it; nothing is sent until you answer that card. Each count carries only:
The counts never contain your files, their contents, their names, folders or paths, which apps you have, your Mac's name, or your licence key. Our server accepts only the fixed list of step names and ranges above and throws anything else away, and it does not keep your IP address.
To turn the counts off: the card's Turn off button, or LighterMac › Settings, or in
Terminal defaults write com.cosmovex.lightermac LighterMac.telemetryOff -bool true. Turning
them off also deletes anything not yet sent. The App Store version sends no counts.
The app's Buy Pro button opens lightermac.com/buy in your browser, which forwards you to Dodo Payments' checkout. On the way it counts the click: which button in the app it came from (for example “over the free limit”) and the country your connection comes from, sent to Google Analytics and to a private chat channel we read. No ID, no IP address, nothing about your files. If you have turned the usage counts off, the button goes straight to the checkout and nothing is counted.
Those are the only network requests LighterMac makes.
LighterMac can answer questions about what it found. On a Mac that supports it, this uses Apple’s on-device model — the question and the answer never leave your Mac. The model is only ever shown the summary LighterMac already computed (names of categories, sizes and dates). It is never shown the contents of a file.
On your Mac: your licence key, which categories you have cleared, and any rules you have written. You can remove all of it by deleting LighterMac and its settings.
On our side: nothing about you or your files. We do not run a database or a user account system. Your purchase record lives with Dodo Payments, whose privacy policy is at dodopayments.com/privacy.
The website uses Google Analytics to count visits, which pages are read, and clicks on the Download and Buy buttons, and taps on the “I’d use it on Windows / Linux” button (only that someone tapped, and the country). When you download LighterMac, our host (Vercel) also records that one download happened, so the count stays right when a browser blocks analytics. This tells us, for example, "a visitor from Germany read the System Data page and downloaded the app" — never who you are.
The Windows and Linux email list. If you enter your email on lightermac.com/windows or /linux, we keep it in a private list, use it once to tell you when that version is ready, and delete it whenever you ask at hello@lightermac.com. It is never sent to Google Analytics, never shared and never sold. Entering it is the only way we ever have it.
In the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland, analytics runs without cookies by default. We do not use advertising cookies, we do not sell data, and we never connect what the website sees to anything the app does — the app's counts carry their own random ID, which nothing on the website knows.
Google's privacy policy: policies.google.com/privacy.
LighterMac is a general-purpose utility and is not directed at children under 13.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it.