OverClean Goes Commercial: 800 Downloads Later, Meet Version 1.3

For the past several months, OverClean has been out in the world as a free preview — no paywall, no sign-up, just a disk scanner we asked early adopters to try and break. About 800 downloads later, with real feedback from real Macs, we’re closing that chapter. Starting today, OverClean is a commercial app: a one-time $9.99 purchase, licensed for up to 3 Macs.

The free-preview chapter

We built OverClean because the usual advice for a full disk — “just check ~/Library and your Downloads folder” — never told the whole story on a developer’s Mac. node_modules folders, abandoned Python virtual environments, Xcode DerivedData, orphaned app data from software you uninstalled a year ago: all of it hides in places Finder doesn’t make easy to see.

The free preview existed to answer one question before we charged anyone a cent: does this actually work, reliably, across the wide variety of Macs and file systems people really have? Early adopters scanned everything from lightly-used laptops to decade-deep development machines, and the bug reports and feature requests that came back shaped almost everything in this release.

Why we’re going commercial (and staying one-time)

Most of the well-known Mac storage-management apps on the market are subscriptions. You keep paying, indefinitely, for a tool that mostly does the same job every month.

OverClean isn’t going that route. It’s a one-time purchase: pay $9.99 once, activate it on up to 3 Macs, and it’s yours. No recurring charges, no subscription to remember to cancel. Deactivate a device any time to free up a slot for a new Mac. If you’re offline, your license keeps working for up to 14 days before it needs to re-check in.

The free tier isn’t going away either — you can still download OverClean, run a full scan, and see the Dashboard’s breakdown of where your space went, at no cost. The license unlocks the Details browser, the Applications manager, and Leftovers detection — the tools you actually use to reclaim the space.

What’s new since the first versions

A lot has changed since the earliest builds we handed to testers. Highlights from this release:

• A unified 3-phase scan — disk scan, installed-applications scan, and leftovers detection now run as one guided flow instead of three separate tools.
• A real Dashboard — pie charts, top categories, top directories, and top applications, at a glance.
• 26+ file categories, including dedicated buckets for Git repositories, node_modules, Python virtual environments, Xcode DerivedData, Android Studio, and Docker.
• Applications Manager — inventories everything in /Applications, ~/Applications, and /System/Applications with real bundle sizes, not folder-size guesses.
• Leftovers Detection with safety rules — finds orphaned data from apps you’ve already uninstalled, while dynamically protecting still-installed software by bundle ID and vendor.
• Safer deletion — items move to the Trash by default; permanent deletion only happens through an explicit admin-permission fallback, never automatically.
• More accurate accounting — disk usage now uses allocated size on disk and deduplicates hard-linked files by device and inode, so totals actually match reality.
• The license system — everything described above that ties into activation, device limits, and offline grace periods.

How OverClean compares

If you’ve used OmniDiskSweeper or GrandPerspective (sometimes bundled or compared under names like Mole), you know the appeal: a fast, honest visualization of what’s eating your disk. What those tools don’t do is tell you what kind of file it is, whether it’s safe to remove, or whether it’s leftover data from something you already uninstalled. DaisyDisk improves the visualization but is itself a paid, one-purpose tool with the same limitation.

OverClean starts from the same idea — scan first, decide later — and adds the layer those tools skip: categorization, an Applications manager, and Leftovers detection, all offline, with your file data never leaving your Mac. And unlike subscription-based storage apps, it asks for that once, not every month.

Free vs. licensed, in short

Download OverClean and scan your whole Mac for free — the Dashboard and category overview are yours with no license at all. When you’re ready to dig into the Details browser, manage installed apps, or clean up leftovers, a one-time $9.99 license unlocks all of it on up to 3 Macs.

Get a license → or download & scan free →

Thank you to our early adopters

To everyone who downloaded a rough-edged preview build, filed a bug report, or just quietly used OverClean and let it crash without complaining: this release exists because of that feedback. Thank you for testing it before we asked anyone to pay for it.