NetPulse

A featherweight macOS menu bar meter for live network speed — download and upload at a glance, every second.

_{Direct download · macOS 13+ · free & open source · all releases · ☕ buy me a coffee}

Tiny stacked down/up numbers sit in your menu bar — blue for download, green for upload, red when you're offline. Click for the full panel: live speeds, a history chart, session totals, and per-interface detail.

Install

1. Click the Download button above (it always grabs the newest DMG)
2. Open it and drag NetPulse into Applications
3. Launch it — the meter appears in your menu bar

First launch on a fresh download: releases aren't notarized with a paid Apple Developer ID, so macOS may block the first open. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the "NetPulse was blocked" notice, and click Open Anyway (older macOS: right-click the app → Open). Only needed once.

Requires macOS 13 Ventura or later. No permissions — traffic counters come from the same public interface statistics netstat prints. No network use except update checks.

Features

• Live down/up speed — sampled once a second from the kernel's per-interface byte counters. Menu bar modes: both (stacked), down only, up only, or a quiet icon — all the same fixed width, so your menu bar never shifts.
• Offline at a glance — the glyph turns red the moment no interface is connected.
• History chart — download and upload over the last 15m / 1h / 24h, kept in memory only.
• Session totals — data downloaded and uploaded since launch, plus peak speeds.
• Interfaces — live per-interface rates with friendly names (Wi-Fi, Ethernet…). VPN tunnels are listed separately and never double-counted in the totals.
• Bytes or bits — read speeds as MB/s or flip one switch for Mbps to compare against your ISP plan.
• In-app updates — checks this repo's Releases page; one press downloads, verifies the published sha256, swaps the app in place, and relaunches.
• Native SwiftUI, light/dark aware, no Dock icon, optional Launch at Login.

Light by design

NetPulse is built to be invisible in Activity Monitor, not just in the menu bar:

• One sysctl read per second — the same counters netstat -ib prints, a few microseconds of work, no processes spawned.
• The menu bar glyph is re-drawn only when the displayed number actually changes — an idle connection costs zero rendering.
• History lives in a bounded in-memory buffer; NetPulse does zero disk I/O while running.
• When your displays sleep, sampling stops entirely and resumes on wake.
• Charts exist only while the panel is open.

Native Swift, no Electron, no helper daemons — a fraction of a percent of CPU and a few tens of MB of memory, most of which is Apple's UI framework baseline shared with every other Swift app.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/michaelmax98/NetPulse.git
cd NetPulse
swift run -c release      # run it directly
./build-app.sh            # or build build/NetPulse.app

Releases are built by GitHub Actions: the release workflow compiles on a macOS runner, packages the DMG, and publishes it with a stable-named NetPulse.dmg so the download button always serves the newest version.

How it reads the numbers

Every second NetPulse asks the kernel's routing table for interface statistics (sysctl NET_RT_IFLIST2 — public API, no privileges) and diffs the lifetime byte counters to get bytes/second. Totals count physical interfaces (en*: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, tethering). VPN tunnels (utun*) are shown in the Interfaces list but excluded from totals, since their traffic also crosses the physical interface and would double-count.

Siblings

NetPulse is part of a small family of one-job menu bar apps: BetterBattery (live battery wattage) and DayDial (the day, burning down).

Support

Free and open source. If it earns a spot in your menu bar, you can buy me a coffee ☕

License

MIT