Hotspot Meter

A private data-usage meter for your Mac menu bar

Productivity

Privacy

Menu Bar Apps

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@Michal Ferák good to hear it's a public interface API and not something more fragile under the hood. "drops to zero instead of freezing on a stale number" is the right failure mode too, at least it's obviously broken instead of quietly wrong. appreciate the detailed answer.

Congrats on the launch, Mikey! Keeping everything strictly local with zero telemetry or accounts is a massive plus for a utility like this.

Quick question on the network detection: How does Hotspot Meter handle multi-interface scenarios—for instance, if a user is connected to Wi-Fi while tethered via USB, does it strictly monitor the primary active default gateway, or track both interfaces in parallel?

menu bar network meters are usually the first thing to break after a macOS update since they tend to rely on lower-level networking APIs that Apple quietly changes. has Hotspot Meter run into that yet, and if a future macOS update did break the live speed tracking, would people just see frozen/wrong numbers or would it fail more visibly than that?

the fact that it attributes to the network itself rather than inferring from the name is a smart detail, avoids the fake-hotspot-name problem entirely. one question on the totals - do they reset on any kind of cycle, like monthly, or is it purely cumulative since first-seen until someone manually resets it? most data caps are monthly, so lining the alert threshold up with a billing cycle rather than an all-time total seems like it'd matter a lot in practice

A private, local data-usage meter is a nice niche — a lot of people tethering off their phone have no idea how close they are to a cap until it's too late. Does it work specifically for hotspot connections, or does it track all network usage on the Mac generally?

Honestly right now I just glance at my carrier's app once a day and hope for the best, there's no real per-connection visibility, so if I burn through a hotspot cap it's usually a surprise after the fact rather than something I saw coming. The thing that would make this genuinely useful for me is the alert before a chosen data limit, since that turns it from a monitoring tool into something that actually prevents the overage rather than just reporting it after the damage is done. One thing I'd want to understand: since everything is calculated and stored locally with automatic detection of hotspot connections, how does it distinguish a phone hotspot from a normal home or office Wi-Fi network reliably. Network names and signal characteristics vary a lot, so I'm curious if that detection is based on something structural about how the connection behaves, or more heuristic and occasionally something you'd need to correct manually.

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?

Seeing exactly how much data each network uses without accounts or tracking is simple but genuinely useful. Congrats on the launch!

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?

The menu bar integration is clean and unobtrusive. It gives me the information I need without getting in the way.