Snug

Your menu bar, only what you want.

A menu bar manager for macOS. Snug tucks the icons you don’t need out of sight and hands any of them back the moment you ask. A snug is the small hidden side-room in a pub, which turns out to be exactly the job description.

The Snug home page: the Snug wordmark over “Your menu bar, only what you want” and a macOS menu bar with icons tucked away
Platform
macOS 15 and later
Price
$19 once
Distribution
Direct download, notarized
Domain
snug.menu

What it does

Tuck, peek, get on with it

  • Click to tuck, click to peek. Snug sits in the bar. Click it and everything to its left tucks away. Click it again and the whole row comes back.
  • Search the ones you hid. Type three letters and the icon you want steps forward, without dragging the other fourteen out with it.
  • Triggers. Bring an icon back automatically when a condition is true: on battery, on a call, when the VPN drops. The icons you need are the ones that earn their spot that minute.
  • No screen recording. The obvious way to build this category asks macOS for permission to record your screen. Snug does the job without ever asking, which is the entire reason it exists.
  • No account, no telemetry. Nothing to sign up for and nothing phoning home. The license key arrives by email and the app never needs to know who you are again.
  • One purchase. $19, once. Not $19 a year.

Why it exists

The thing that watches your menu bar

A menu bar manager sits in front of everything you have running: the app that is syncing, the one that is recording, the one you forgot you installed. It is, structurally, the last piece of software on the machine you want to be vague about.

So Snug is built so the trust question never has to be taken on faith. It does not request screen recording. It has no account and no server to have an account on. It does not report usage anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to report to. You buy it once and it is yours, which also removes the incentive to invent reasons to keep talking to you.

The feature list is deliberately unsurprising. This category is well understood and the incumbent is good at it. The difference is the permissions dialog you never see.

Status, honestly: Snug is in build. snug.menu is up, the licensing and notarization pipeline works end to end, and the app has not been released yet.

First builds

Want an early build?

Tell us how bad your menu bar has gotten and mention Snug in the message.

Get on the list