CleanMyMac pricing: what the free tier covers

The trial is about to end, the icon is still sitting in the menu bar, and a decision has to be made. Searching for "CleanMyMac ryoukin" turns up a number, but rarely the shape behind it, and the shape is what makes the decision. There is no single price. There are three billing forms, three device tiers, and three storefronts, and the storefront changes not only the amount but also what the app can do.

This article lays out those axes with figures checked on 10 September 2026, so the right cell can be picked rather than guessed.

Three billing shapes, and what separates them

On the MacPaw Store the same app is sold three ways: annual subscription, monthly subscription, and a one-time purchase. The published entry point is $3.33 per month, which is the annual plan for a single Mac divided into months. The store bills that plan once a year rather than monthly.

The gap between the three is wider than it first looks. On the Japanese storefront, where the single Mac annual plan is 4,692 yen a year, the monthly plan is 1,408 yen. Paid twelve times, that comes to 16,896 yen, roughly 3.6 times the annual figure. The one-time purchase, 12,505 yen, equals about 2.66 years of the annual plan. Currencies differ, but the ratios between the three forms are set the same way in each one.

That ratio is the actual decision. Monthly only wins for short, bounded jobs: clearing out a Mac before selling it, recovering disk space once before a large project, working through a backlog of leftover files over a few weeks. Anything measured in years pushes toward the annual plan, and anything past the third year pushes toward the one-time purchase, with the caveat covered further down.

The developer states plainly that the number shown depends on where the buyer is.

CleanMyMac pricing depends on factors like number of devices covered, upgrade possibilities, and country-specific taxes. Therefore, it's best to check the current pricing plans directly on the respective store. Source: macpaw.com, checked 10 September 2026

Device count is the second axis

Every billing form comes in three sizes: one Mac, two Macs, or five Macs. The larger tiers carry a discount off the list figure, and the per machine cost falls sharply.

Using the Japanese storefront figures for the annual plan, one Mac costs 4,692 yen a year, two Macs cost 7,508 yen (3,754 each), and five Macs cost 15,016 yen (3,003 each). The five Mac tier lands at about 64 percent of the single Mac rate per machine. The same pattern holds on the monthly and one-time plans.

Those slots do not have to stay in one household or one desk. A MacPaw account can hand a slot to another person by email invitation. The slot sits reserved until that person activates a copy, and it can be pulled back later, at which point they receive a notification. A slot can also be replaced from a new Mac during activation, which quietly takes the slot from whoever held it. Beyond five machines, the route is either a second plan or a conversation with support.

The practical read: two people who each need one Mac covered pay less by splitting a two Mac plan than by buying two single plans, and the arithmetic gets better at five.

What free actually covers

There is no free tier. What exists is a seven day trial with full functionality, and it is seven days on all three storefronts, with no difference between them. During the trial nothing is held back.

After the trial ends, the app still launches, but the parts that act on the disk lock. Cleanup, malware removal, maintenance tasks, and the uninstaller stop being available until a plan is active. There is no reduced free mode that keeps running in the background, so "let it sit there unpaid and just watch the numbers" is not one of the options.

That makes the last day of the trial a useful measuring point. The question worth answering is not which features exist but which ones were opened during those seven days, and of those, which ones were actually run. A monitor that was glanced at daily is worth paying for. A module that was opened once out of curiosity and never run is not, and it will not become worth paying for later just because the plan covers it.

What a one-time purchase does not include

A one-time purchase has no expiry date, but it is scoped to one major version. It carries updates and fixes for the version it was bought against, and it stops there. The developer's own example is that a CleanMyMac X one-time licence does not carry over to the current CleanMyMac. Every subscription, on any storefront, does include future major versions.

So the two options are not "pay once" against "pay forever". They are a permanent right to today's version against a rolling right to whatever the current version is.

The point where that matters is a new Mac. Supported systems are listed as macOS Tahoe 26, Sequoia 15, Sonoma 14, Ventura 13, Monterey 12, and Big Sur 11, with Catalina 10.15 and earlier unsupported. A one-time purchase effectively expires on the day the machine it runs on moves past what that version supports.

Owners of the previous version have a bridge. A CleanMyMac X subscription converts to a current subscription at no extra cost, and the old licence is deactivated. A CleanMyMac X one-time purchase upgrades at up to 50 percent off, and both licences stay active, so the older app can keep running alongside.

Three storefronts, three ways the price is set

Storefront	Billing forms	How devices are counted	Major upgrades
MacPaw Store	Annual, monthly, one-time	Plans for 1, 2 or 5 Macs	Subscriptions only
App Store	Annual, monthly, one-time	Macs on the same Apple Account	Subscriptions only
Setapp	Membership fee	Plans for 1 or 4 Macs	Included while a member

Setapp is a subscription catalogue from the same developer, and CleanMyMac is one title inside it. Checked on 10 September 2026, the Mac plan is $14.99 per month, the Mac and iOS plan is $18.99, and the plan covering four Macs and four iOS devices is $22.99, with up to 40 percent off on annual billing. The catalogue lists over 260 apps, and the fee does not change with how many get used.

Bought purely for this one app, Setapp costs more per year than the MacPaw Store annual plan. Used for three or four titles that would otherwise be bought separately, the total moves the other way. The number that decides it is how many Setapp apps end up in regular use, not the price of any single one.

One difference is not about money. The App Store edition drops several features that Apple's review rules do not permit, including malware monitoring in the menu bar portion and the alerts tied to it. Sorting the three storefronts by price alone hides that.

Five discounts that are published, not negotiated

The conditions are documented rather than case by case, which makes them easy to check before paying list price.

• 30 percent off for anyone who has previously bought a MacPaw product, applied at the MacPaw Store only and not through the App Store or Setapp
• 30 percent off for students and teachers, requested with a school email address
• 40 percent off a one year subscription for users of a competing Mac cleaning or protection app, granted after submitting the app name and proof of purchase
• Upgrade pricing from earlier versions, self service for CleanMyMac X and by support request for older releases
• 50 percent off for Apple and Claris employees, using a personal address from either company

Seasonal coupon codes appear around holidays and are entered in the Special Offers area at the bottom of the store page. They expire, so a code found in a months old article is unlikely to still work.

A three year view, which is where the forms separate

Comparing a monthly figure against a one-time figure is comparing two different things. Running both out to three years on one Mac, using the Japanese storefront numbers, makes the shape visible.

Monthly billing reaches 16,896 yen after the first year, 33,792 after the second, and 50,688 after the third. Annual billing reaches 4,692, then 9,384, then 14,076. The one-time purchase stays flat at 12,505 from day one, which means it is still behind the annual plan at the end of year two and moves ahead partway through year three.

Setapp sits outside that comparison because the fee buys a catalogue rather than a title. At $14.99 monthly for the Mac plan, three years costs roughly $540 before the annual discount, which only makes sense when several catalogue apps are in daily use.

Two things bend those lines. The first is the upgrade rule: the one-time purchase holds its price only as long as the installed major version is the one being used, and the moment a new major version is wanted, a paid upgrade lands on top of the 12,505. The second is device count. A household with two Macs on a shared two Mac annual plan pays 3,754 per machine per year, which is below the single Mac one-time purchase spread over three years, and it carries every future version.

The honest summary is that the one-time purchase is the cheapest option only for someone who plans to stay on one major version, on one machine, for at least three years, and who is comfortable paying again when that stops being true.

Refunds, cancellation, and the thing people get wrong

The store page shows a 30 day money back guarantee on the annual and one-time plans and 14 days on the monthly plan. The shorter window on monthly matches its smaller amount.

Cancelling depends on where the purchase happened. MacPaw Store purchases are cancelled from the MacPaw account page, and the status turns inactive within a few minutes. App Store purchases are cancelled through Account Settings in the App Store app. In both cases the app keeps working until the end of the period already paid for, then most features lock. There is no benefit to cancelling early.

The mistake that costs money is treating removal as cancellation. Dragging the app off the Mac does nothing to the billing. The subscription renews on schedule and the card is charged, whether or not the app is still installed. Anyone deciding to stop should do both, in either order, and confirm the account page shows the subscription as cancelled.

What to change first

Answer one question before looking at any price: are the menu bar numbers being read, or is the icon just occupying a slot. If the modules get used but the readouts do not, the display can be switched off while the plan continues, and a menu bar organizer can keep the icon reachable without giving it permanent space. Comparing that class of tool against the alternatives is covered on how it compares, and the cost of Koffret itself is a fraction of what is being weighed here.