Everything you need to know about CleanMacStorage, its licensing, safety, and compatibility.
The Lifetime License is a one-time purchase with zero recurring subscriptions. It includes all future major software updates forever — no annual renewal needed. You receive a cryptographic license key via email immediately after purchase.
The Annual Pass ($15/yr) gives you 12 months of full access and software updates — great if you want to try it first at a low cost. The Lifetime License ($49 one-time) never expires and includes all future updates permanently. After just 3 years of the Annual plan, Lifetime pays for itself.
Yes. Inside the app go to License Activation → Deactivate Device. This frees your license slot and you can immediately activate your key on a new Mac.
Your license key is delivered instantly to the email you enter at checkout. Copy the key, open CleanMacStorage, navigate to License Activation in the sidebar, paste the key, and click Activate.
Yes, 100%. DerivedData contains intermediate build caches — Xcode rebuilds them on next compile. Docker caches are automatically recreated when needed. All files are sent to the native macOS Trash first, so you can always restore anything within Finder.
No. CleanMacStorage only runs when you explicitly open it. When you close the window, it consumes exactly 0% CPU and 0 MB RAM — no launch daemons, no menu bar agents, no background processes whatsoever.
No. Your file paths, folder names, and disk contents never leave your Mac. The only network request CleanMacStorage makes is to the license validation server when you activate a key. There is zero telemetry or analytics.
All deletions go through the native macOS Trash via AppleScript. Nothing is permanently erased until you empty the Trash yourself. Simply open Finder, go to Trash, and drag the files back to restore them.
CleanMacStorage supports macOS Sequoia (15), Sonoma (14), Ventura (13), and Monterey (12). It runs natively on Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, M4) and also on Intel 64-bit Macs.
Yes. CleanMacStorage is an Electron-based app and runs natively on both Apple Silicon (arm64) and Intel (x86_64) Macs. Every feature works identically on both architectures — the only difference is the NVMe benchmark numbers will reflect Intel SSD speeds.
The app bundle is approximately 12 MB on disk. When running, it uses under 42 MB of RAM. When closed, it uses 0 MB RAM and 0% CPU.
The treemap is rendered on a hardware-accelerated HTML5 Canvas element using a squarified treemap layout algorithm. The disk scan uses a recursive async thread pool that reads directory metadata in parallel, dramatically outperforming single-threaded crawlers. On a 1 TB SSD, the full scan completes in under 10 seconds.
CleanMacStorage uses mdfind — Apple's Spotlight metadata query tool — which reads from a pre-built kernel-level database rather than walking the filesystem. This is how results appear in under 300 milliseconds on a 1 TB+ drive.
For the best scan results (including scanning system directories and ~/Library), CleanMacStorage will prompt you to grant Full Disk Access in System Settings → Privacy & Security. This is optional — the app works without it but will skip protected directories.
