Mac software, one person
Halo finds the menu bar icon that went missing. Eclipse puts sixteen tools in the notch. VolTally tells you what ate the SSD. All Swift, all bought once.
Halo · Menu bar manager
Halo pushes the status items you never click past the edge of the screen, then keeps a searchable list of all of them, including the ones under the camera housing. Hidden items slide back out on their own when they change: battery at 10%, Dropbox syncing, VPN dropped. It asks for Accessibility and nothing else.
$15 once · 3 Macs · 14-day trial, no card
Eclipse · Notch app
Now playing with scrub-to-seek, a shelf you drag files onto, clipboard history with real colour swatches, per-core CPU, weather, eight synthesised ambient rooms, a Pomodoro that auto-advances. It sits at 0.2% CPU while you ignore it.
$5.99 once · Lifetime updates · Works without a notch
VolTally · Disk analyzer
Most analyzers quietly drop what they cannot open and hand you a number that does not add up. VolTally walks the volume with getattrlistbulk into a SQLite index, then shows it as a list, treemap or sunburst and matches duplicates by content rather than name. Reviewed items go to the Trash. The app never deletes anything, and Time Machine snapshots stay read-only.
$24 once · 3 Macs · Sold on its own site
Everything
Three decisions I made once, so I stop relitigating them.
I ask for the smallest permission that does the job. Halo needs Accessibility to read the names of your status items, so that is the one thing it asks for. Eclipse asks for nothing at launch, then asks per feature. Neither has ever requested Screen Recording, because I do not want the ability to read your screen and you should not have to trust me with it.
Everything stays on the machine. No analytics SDK, no crash pings, no account. Your clipboard history, notes, scans and layouts are files in your own Library folder. The only requests that leave are ones you can name: weather from Open-Meteo, and whatever payment API you pasted a read-only key into.
I charge once. A utility that lives in your menu bar should not bill you monthly, so you buy a version and keep it, and updates are free for the window each app states. If it does not work on your Mac, tell me inside 14 days and I refund it without asking why.