Launching today
Hotspot Meter
A private data-usage meter for your Mac menu bar
50 followers
A private data-usage meter for your Mac menu bar
50 followers
Hotspot Meter is a free macOS menu-bar app that shows exactly how much data each Wi-Fi network and phone hotspot uses. See live download and upload speeds, track session and per-network totals, review usage history, and get an alert before reaching your data cap. Everything runs locally on your Mac: no analytics, no accounts, and no personal data collected or transmitted.
macOS already exposes some network usage data through the Activity Monitor and network interfaces, curious what Hotspot Meter is doing that the built-in tools don't. Is it persisting session and historical data that macOS would otherwise discard on reboot, doing per-network attribution that the OS doesn't track natively, or something else that makes it worth installing alongside what's already there?
@ansari_adin Great question. Yep, those are exactly the gaps Hotspot Meter is designed to fill.
It doesn’t replace or reinterpret macOS’s underlying network counters. It samples the system-provided interface counters and turns them into persistent, network-specific usage:
Activity Monitor is useful for live and per-process traffic, but it doesn’t maintain a durable total for each Wi-Fi network or hotspot.
Hotspot Meter attributes usage to the current SSID or tethered interface and stores cumulative download/upload totals, first-seen, and last-seen dates across app launches and reboots.
It also keeps a separate session total, shows live speeds in the menu bar, and can notify you before either the session or network total reaches a chosen limit.
Tracking can start automatically when macOS identifies a connection as expensive or tethered.
There’s no packet inspection, VPN profile, kernel extension, or per-app surveillance involved. Everything is calculated from local counters and stored on the Mac. Location permission is only needed because macOS requires it to read the Wi-Fi network name; no location data is stored.
So the distinction is less “more raw network data” and more “making that data persistent, attributable to a specific network, and useful for managing a data cap.”
@thys_beesman That’s precisely the role I had in mind for the alerts - to help you act before reaching the cap, rather than simply explaining afterward where the data went.
Hotspot detection isn’t based on the network name or signal characteristics. For Wi-Fi hotspots, Hotspot Meter uses Apple’s Network framework, which tells apps when macOS considers the active connection “expensive.” Phone hotspots are normally classified this way by the system. USB tethering is detected separately from the active interface type.
There is one limitation: if macOS doesn’t classify a particular Wi-Fi hotspot as “expensive”, automatic tracking won’t start. You can still start tracking manually on any network, and the per-network totals and limit alerts work normally. There isn’t currently a manual “always treat this network as a hotspot” setting, but that would be a useful addition for connections macOS misclassifies.
Usage is attributed to the Wi-Fi network name rather than inferred from its name, so differently named hotspots aren’t a problem. The alert should be treated as a practical early warning rather than an exact carrier-billing figure: Hotspot Meter measures only the data used by your Mac over that connection. It cannot include data consumed directly on the phone or by other devices, and the carrier may also count traffic slightly differently.
Really practical idea. Activity Monitor can show traffic in the moment, but persistent totals for each network make the data much more useful. The automatic hotspot detection and live menu bar speeds are great touches too. Can users export their usage history, perhaps as a CSV, for reviewing monthly data patterns?
@cathy_cc Thank you! CSV export isn’t available yet, but that’s a great idea for a future update. Especially when paired with date ranges for reviewing monthly patterns. For now, usage history stays within the app and is stored locally on the Mac unless the user resets the counter. I’ve added export to my list of features to explore.
The menu bar integration is clean and unobtrusive. It gives me the information I need without getting in the way.
@sudalaiyandi_sabarish_kumar Thank you! Keeping it useful at a glance without adding more menu-bar noise was a big part of the design. I’m glad that balance is working for you.
@etiennegarcia Thank you! That’s exactly what I was aiming for: a focused utility that answers one practical question without turning the user into the product. If you give it a try, I’d love to hear how it works for you.