Bartender pricing: what the free tier covers

The pricing section lists three options, and the tier names alone do not explain what separates them. That is where most people stop when working out what a menu bar utility should cost, because the number is easy to read and the conditions attached to it are not.

The difference between the tiers comes down to one question: when the next major version ships, does another payment follow. Answer that, apply it to how often this particular Mac moves to a new macOS release, and the choice makes itself. What follows is the published pricing, what each tier includes, how the trial works, what happens to an existing license, and how the totals compare across three years. Prices were checked on 2026-09-10 on the official site.

Three tiers, and what each one covers

Displayed from Japan, the pricing section reads as follows.

Tier	Payment	Price	Includes
Bartender 6	One time	3,072 yen	Menu bar management and all updates to that version
Bartender Pro	Yearly	2,095 yen per year	Bartender 6 plus the Pro suite, and future upgrades while subscribed
Mega Supporter	One time	12,288 yen	Everything in Pro, lifetime access, all future upgrades

The same page also shows a dollar figure, "Buy from $12". What appears depends on region and currency, so the amount that actually gets charged is whatever the checkout screen shows at the time of purchase. The lifetime tier currently carries a launch discount label, which means that figure is explicitly temporary.

Note that only the middle tier is a subscription. Menu bar utilities on macOS have historically been sold outright, and a yearly plan is the newer arrangement here, introduced alongside a separate Pro suite of tools that live in the notch area. Somebody who bought outright years ago can read that either as a wider set of options or as a paid route to future major versions. Both readings describe the same three rows.

"Updates to this version" and "future versions" are different things

Most misreadings of software pricing come from the word update carrying two meanings.

Updates to the current version means bug fixes and refinements to the release already purchased. Those are included in the one-time price.

Future major versions means the next numbered release. Those are not included. The one-time tier is described as including all updates to that version, and the two higher tiers are the ones that state future upgrades explicitly.

This structure follows from how macOS evolves. Every major system release changes internals that menu bar tools depend on, which forces something close to a rebuild. The cost of that rebuild has to be recovered either through selling a new version or through a subscription. A one-time price looks cheaper largely because the rebuild is not priced into it yet.

The decision rule is straightforward. A Mac that moves to each new macOS soon after release should be budgeted with an additional payment every few years. A Mac that stays on an older system for a long time can sit on the one-time tier without friction. The way tiers are structured across this category is set out on the Pricing page.

Four weeks of unlimited trial before paying

Before comparing amounts, look at the trial terms. The current version offers a four week trial with no card required, described as unlimited rather than feature restricted.

No, Bartender 6 is not free, but it has a 4-week unlimited trial. If you own any previous version, you can get an upgrade discount. Source: macbartender.com

For a utility touched dozens of times a day, trial length is as material as price. A seven day trial ends before a macOS update arrives and often before the machine has been restarted more than once, which leaves the two most common failure modes untested. Four weeks is long enough to answer questions that no feature page can:

• How many actions it takes to reach the three icons used most often once they are hidden.
• Whether the arrangement survives a restart, checked twice rather than once.
• How the tool behaves with an external display attached.
• Whether a busy week and a quiet week produce different usage patterns.

Anything not touched during four weeks is unlikely to be touched after purchase either. That makes the trial useful in both directions: it confirms what is needed, and it retires requirements that turn out to be imaginary.

There is no permanently free tier, and what that leaves

Search traffic around this topic frequently assumes a free tier exists alongside the paid ones. It does not. The published answer is direct: the app is not free, and the four week trial is what stands in for a free tier. Once the trial ends, continued use requires one of the three purchases.

That leaves two other routes for anyone who would rather not pay. The first is macOS itself. Holding Command while dragging a menu bar item changes its position, and some system items can be dragged off the bar entirely. That covers reordering and removing, but not hiding third party items on demand, which is the part most people are actually looking for.

The second route is the open source end of this category, where several projects distribute menu bar organizers at no cost through GitHub or the Mac App Store. Cost moves rather than disappearing: installation can involve clearing a Gatekeeper prompt manually depending on how a build is signed, update cadence depends on a maintainer's available time, and feature scope is often limited to hiding without the surrounding conveniences. For someone whose only complaint is the number of visible icons, that trade is frequently worth making.

Existing licenses depend on the year of purchase

For anyone who already owns the previous version, the upgrade terms split on when it was bought. The published FAQ states that a Bartender 5 purchase made in 2025 is entitled to a free upgrade to Bartender 6, and that earlier purchases qualify for a discounted upgrade.

If the purchase date is not obvious, the receipt email is the fastest source. Failing that, the site offers a license lookup page that emails the registered details back.

One condition matters more than the price for anyone upgrading: settings do not carry across. The FAQ states that Bartender 5 settings cannot be transferred into Bartender 6, attributing it to platform changes in macOS Tahoe, and recommends screenshotting the current setup first so it can be recreated from a reference. Rebuilding a layout takes roughly fifteen to thirty minutes, which is manageable when planned and disruptive when discovered halfway through a working day.

One license covers every Mac one person uses

An easily missed detail is the unit a license is counted in. The FAQ states that a single license covers all the Macs owned and primarily used by that person. It is priced per person, not per machine.

That changes real cost substantially. For someone running a desktop and a laptop, a per machine license and a per person license at the same headline figure differ by a factor of two. When comparing candidates, writing the unit next to each price makes the comparison honest.

Organizational purchases sit outside that arrangement. Terms written around personal ownership and primary use do not describe company owned machines shared between staff, so whether a per seat purchase or a volume arrangement applies is a question to settle before buying rather than after.

Distribution channel affects cost as well. The FAQ notes availability through a subscription app service via its beta program, which requires opting in inside that service. For an existing subscriber, that may mean no additional payment at all. For everyone else, it turns into a comparison against that service's monthly fee. Differences in how tools are distributed and licensed are covered on the How it compares page.

Totals across three years

Comparing single payments hides the actual difference. Extended over three years, the arithmetic looks like this.

Tier	Three year total	Per month
One time, assuming no new major version	3,072 yen	about 85 yen
One time, assuming one new major version purchased	6,144 yen	about 171 yen
Yearly	6,285 yen	about 175 yen
Lifetime	12,288 yen	about 341 yen

Two things follow. If a new major version gets purchased once within three years, the one-time route and the yearly route land within a rounding error of each other. And the spread across every tier is about 256 yen a month.

At that spread, price stops being the deciding factor. What decides comfort is how many actions a hidden icon costs each time. Clicking a hidden icon while the bar stays collapsed, so its menu opens in place, is one action. Expanding everything and then clicking is two. At twenty uses a day, that is thousands of extra actions a year, and it appears nowhere in a pricing table. What a tool can and cannot do is described on the Features page.

Five things to confirm at checkout

Pricing information ages. Immediately before buying, confirm these on the official purchase page:

• The current amount and currency, since both vary by region.
• What each tier includes, specifically whether future major versions are covered.
• Trial length and conditions, including whether a card is required.
• Upgrade terms for an existing license, which depend on the purchase year.
• Supported macOS versions, since the current release targets the two newest and older systems are served by the previous release.

A tier carrying a discount label can change price once that period ends, so a figure noted today should not be assumed to hold months from now. Installation steps and system requirements are listed on the Download page.

What the questions from readers suggest

Sorting pricing questions by topic produces a clear pattern. Very few ask what the price is. Most ask what a tier includes, whether it covers more than one Mac, and how an existing license is treated. The number is printed on the page, so it does not generate questions. The conditions that are not printed are what stall the decision.

That has an implication for how pricing pages should be built. Enlarging the number changes nothing. Stating what is included, and in what unit the license is counted, removes most of the back and forth. From a reader's side, the bullet list under a tier name is the substance, and the figure is a consequence of it.

The other pattern is that cost questions and switching questions arrive together. Whether settings transfer never appears in a price table, yet when they do not, the rebuild consumes real time, and at any professional hourly rate that time can exceed the software price. Sorting menu bar items into always visible, hidden but reachable, and always hidden before buying makes the rebuild short regardless of which tier gets chosen, because that classification is the one asset that carries across every tool.

What to change first

Decide whether future major versions need to be covered, since that single question separates the three tiers. Then start the four week trial before paying, and use it to count actions rather than to admire features. Common questions about licensing and setup are answered on the Koffret FAQ page.