Reclaim

The problem

You delete things and the disk stays full. Finder says one number, About This Mac says another, and neither of them is the number that matters.

On a working developer Mac the space is rarely in your documents. It is in places nothing ever asks you about: Xcode archives from builds you shipped a year ago, simulator runtimes for iOS versions you no longer support, Gradle and Homebrew and pnpm caches, Docker images, node_modules in projects you have not opened since spring, and AI model weights measured in tens of gigabytes.

What Reclaim does about it

It measures all of it and then explains every item before it removes anything. Each finding carries a label — safe, review, caution or report only — and a sentence saying what the thing is and what losing it costs you. A Gradle cache rebuilds itself; an Xcode archive is how you re-symbolicate a crash from a shipped build. Those are not the same decision, and a cleaner that calls both "junk" is asking you to gamble.

How it decides

Every path passes a deny-by-default guard before deletion. Your documents, keychains, iCloud Drive, system folders and configuration are refused even if a scanner asks for them. Projects you have touched recently are classified more conservatively than ones you have not — an active repository's node_modules is review, an abandoned one's is safe.

What it will not do

It will not delete a startup item or a piece of adware. It reports those, with the evidence and the command to remove them yourself, because something that silently removes things that launch at login is indistinguishable from the problem it claims to solve.

It is not an antivirus and does not pretend to be one.

What it costs

Free, no account required, no adverts, and nothing leaves your machine.

Scanning is never limited — every category, the full report, every time. Nor is clearing anything it labels safe: caches, build output, machine state that rebuilds itself. Clear that as often as you like, for nothing, forever.

The rows that need a judgement call — unused apps, Xcode archives, simulator runtimes, leftovers from apps you deleted — unlock when you connect a Gossip account, which costs nothing. If you would rather not have one, a key does the same thing for $3 a year — 25¢ a month, charged once.

A key covers one Mac at a time and can be moved: removing it in Reclaim frees it for the next machine. It is checked on your Mac, not on a server — after the first activation the app never contacts us again, so an outage, a flight, or this company disappearing cannot lock you out of something you paid for.

The line is drawn around what an item is, not how often you clean or how much you clear at a time. A cache either goes or it does not: half-deleting one is worse than leaving it, because "it rebuilds itself" is only true if it goes whole. So nothing is ever partly removed, and nothing you ticked is quietly skipped — a locked row cannot be ticked in the first place.