Private by design
A menu bar utility watches your machine all day. That’s a lot of trust. SpinCat is built so you don’t have to think about where your data goes — because it doesn’t go anywhere.
Local APIs, nothing else
Every system reading comes from a first-party macOS API:
- CPU from Mach
host_processor_infotick deltas - GPU from IOKit
IOAcceleratorutilization keys - Memory from
host_statistics64with pressure and swap - Disk from volume capacity and IOKit byte counters
- Network from the primary interface via
getifaddrs
There’s no shelling out, no powermetrics, no sudo, no PTY probing, and no arbitrary subprocesses. Ever.
No analytics, no telemetry
SpinCat collects no usage data and has no tracking of any kind. There’s no crash-reporting SDK phoning home, no “anonymous metrics” toggle buried in settings. The app simply doesn’t do it.
Network is opt-in
The single exception is AI usage monitoring, and it’s off by default. A quota request only runs when you’ve enabled AI usage and switched on a specific provider. Credentials stay in app-managed local files or the macOS Keychain — never in the display cache, which only keeps token-free snapshots and restores them marked as stale.
Sandboxed and declared
SpinCat runs inside the App Sandbox with a minimal entitlement set: a network client for optional AI quota and OAuth, plus a localhost server for OAuth callbacks. It ships with a privacy manifest and declares that it uses no non-exempt encryption.
Privacy isn’t a setting in SpinCat. It’s the default.