Annual, monthly or once: choosing a SweepyMac plan, and moving a licence between Macs

Pricing pages tend to hide the one thing you want to know, which is which option is actually the better deal for you. This post lays out SweepyMac's plans plainly, does the arithmetic, and then covers the practical side: how a key activates, how it moves between Macs, and what the licence check does and does not send.

Start with the trial

Before any of this, SweepyMac has a three-day free trial covering the full app, every module. There is no account and no card. The licence badge at the bottom of the sidebar shows the trial's state, and when it ends a licence key activates the app. Three days is enough to run a scan, look at your Mac Health score, find your largest files and decide whether it earns its place.

The plans

There are three ways to pay, each for 1, 2 or 5 Macs. At the time of writing the prices are:

Plan	1 Mac	2 Macs	5 Macs
Annual	$14.99 a year	$29 a year	$59 a year
Monthly	$1.99 a month	$3.79 a month	$7.99 a month
Buy once	$59.96	$116	$236

The buy page always has the current prices, and shows each one beside its list price.

Which one to pick

The arithmetic is simpler than it looks.

Monthly costs the most over a year: $1.99 for twelve months is $23.88 for one Mac, against $14.99 on the annual plan. It makes sense if you want SweepyMac for a specific job, clearing out a Mac before selling it or rescuing one that has filled up, and do not expect to need it next year.

Annual is the cheapest way to have it for a year or two, and the right default for most people.

Buy once costs exactly four years of the annual plan at every seat count: $59.96 is four times $14.99, $116 is four times $29, and $236 is four times $59. If you expect to keep the same Macs and keep using SweepyMac for more than four years, it is the cheaper option. If not, annual is.

Seat count follows the Macs you own, not the people. A household with a laptop and a desktop wants the 2-Mac plan; five Macs costs about four times one, not five.

Buying and activating

Checkout is handled by Lemon Squeezy, who take care of payment, tax and receipts. Card details go to them and never reach us. When the purchase completes, your licence key appears on screen and arrives by email.

To activate, open the licence badge at the bottom of SweepyMac's sidebar and enter the key. The badge then reads Activated, as it does in the screenshot above.

Moving to a new Mac

A licence covers as many Macs as the plan you bought. To move it, open the licence badge on the old Mac and choose Deactivate this Mac, which frees its slot. Then activate on the new Mac with the same key.

If the old Mac is already gone, sold, broken or wiped before you remembered, write to us. We can free a retired Mac's slot by hand.

What the licence check sends

SweepyMac has no telemetry and no account, so it is worth being precise about the network traffic the licence adds.

The app contacts the licensing service when you enter a key, to validate it, and re-checks from time to time after that. The check carries what is needed to validate the key and count this Mac against the licence, and nothing about your files, your scans or what you clean. Between checks, the app keeps working for seven days offline after its last successful one, so a flight or a week without Wi-Fi does not lock you out.

The licence state, the key and when it was last checked, is stored on your Mac, in the Keychain and in ~/Library/Application Support/SweepyMac. The only other network request the app makes is for its signed malware definitions file. The post on why our apps make no network requests goes into both in detail.

If you stop using it

Deactivate the Mac from the licence badge first, so the slot is free for a later Mac. Then quit SweepyMac and drag it to the Trash. Its settings and licence live in ~/Library/Application Support/SweepyMac; delete that folder and nothing is left. If you installed the background helper that runs the maintenance tasks in Performance, remove it first from the same screen.

Anything SweepyMac moved to your Trash while you used it stays there, restorable, until you empty it yourself.

Questions

One person makes SweepyMac and reads every message about it. Licence questions, bugs and suggestions all go to the address on the support page, and replies usually go out within two or three days. The plans themselves are on the buy page.