iStat Menus pricing: what the free tier covers

Two questions come first when someone looks up what iStat Menus costs: is it a subscription, and how much. The short answers are no for the app itself, and it depends on which of the three purchase routes gets used, because each one carries a different price, a different minimum macOS version and a different feature set. There is also one component that is billed separately from the license, and missing it is the usual reason a display stops working months after purchase. Every figure below was read directly from the vendor systems on 10 September 2026.

The license is a one time purchase

iStat Menus is made by Bjango Pty Ltd in Australia, and direct sales run through Paddle. Buying a license is a single payment with no renewal attached and no automatic charge later.

Prices are shown in the buyer's local currency. Both the United States and Japan figures are listed here, since the difference between them shows how tax is handled.

License	United States	Japan (tax included)
Single	USD 11.99	JPY 2,065
Family Pack	USD 14.99	JPY 2,582
Single upgrade from version 6	USD 9.99	JPY 1,720
Family Pack upgrade from version 6	USD 12.99	JPY 2,237

The Japanese figures include consumption tax. The single license breaks down as 1,877 yen plus 188 yen of tax, which matters for anyone expensing the purchase.

Nothing about this price repeats annually. Version 7.0 shipped on 31 July 2024 and has been followed by 7.1 in February 2025, 7.2 in November 2025 and 7.3 in May 2026, all free to existing license holders. A paid upgrade only becomes a question when the next major version arrives, and only then.

How many Macs a single license covers

Price per machine is often more decisive than the sticker price, and the license agreement is specific about it:

This License grants you the right to activate and use the Software on no more than 3 computers primarily used by you or on no more than 1 computer if the computer has no primary user. Source: bjango.com

So a single license covers up to three Macs, provided one person is the primary user of all three. A machine with no primary user, such as a shared workstation, counts as one activation on its own. The Family Pack allows up to five computers within one residential household.

That turns the arithmetic around for two common cases. Someone running a work laptop, a desktop at home and a travel machine pays USD 11.99 once and covers all three, which works out under four dollars per Mac. A household where several people each have their own Mac is better served by the Family Pack, since two single licenses already cost more than one Family Pack that covers five machines.

The same document sets out the trial terms: 14 calendar days from first launch, after which all or part of the functionality is disabled automatically. There is no permanently free tier.

The Mac App Store build costs the same and does less

The App Store carries iStat Menus 7 from the same developer. In Japan it is listed at 2,000 yen, in the United States at USD 11.99, currently at version 7.30 with a 27 May 2026 update date. The price is effectively identical to the direct download, but two things are not.

The first is the system requirement. The direct download runs on macOS 11 and later. The App Store listing states macOS 14.0 or later. On an older Mac that single line settles the choice.

The second is scope, and the developer states it plainly:

It can not control fan speeds. The iStat Menus Helper is needed to view some stats. Source: bjango.com

App Store sandboxing rules out the low level access that fan control requires, and some sensor readings need the separate helper component installed alongside. For anyone whose goal is a custom fan curve on a MacBook Pro under sustained load, that rules the App Store build out. For anyone who wants CPU and network figures in the menu bar, it makes no practical difference.

Setapp includes it inside a monthly fee

The third route is Setapp, where iStat Menus appears as one of the included apps. The listing shows version 7.30, macOS 11.0 or later and 32 languages.

Setapp itself starts at USD 14.99 per month plus tax on the Mac only plan, billed monthly, with a 7 day free trial and a discount for annual billing. The plan covering Mac and iOS devices is USD 18.99 per month, and the plan covering four Macs is USD 22.99 per month.

The comparison is easy to get wrong. Subscribing to Setapp purely for this one app costs more in two months than buying the license outright. The route only makes sense as a bundle decision. If three or four other Setapp titles are already in regular use, iStat Menus rides along at no marginal cost. If not, the direct purchase ends the spending.

There is also a difference in what remains after payment stops. The direct download and App Store versions are owned once paid for. Access through a subscription ends when the subscription does.

Weather is billed separately from the license

This is the part of the pricing that surprises people. Every license includes six months of weather data. After that, continuing to see forecasts requires buying a data pack from inside the app.

The data packs start from USD$2.49 (plus local taxes) for 12 months. Data packs can be purchased from within iStat Menus, under the Weather tab. Source: bjango.com

The reasoning is published alongside it. Forecast data comes from paid providers including Apple Weather, Xweather, AccuWeather, Environment Canada and WillyWeather, all of which charge the developer per use. Bundling unlimited weather into the app price would have meant raising that price for everyone, including people who never turn the feature on.

Data packs are one off purchases with no auto renewal. Buying a pack of the same length extends the remaining time, while buying a different length replaces it. At USD 2.49 for 12 months the running cost is around twenty cents a month, and it is zero for anyone who leaves the weather item switched off.

What three years actually costs on each route

Sticker prices compare badly across a one time purchase and a membership, so it helps to fix a period and add everything up. Take three years on a single Mac, with the weather item switched on the whole time.

Route	Three year total	What is included
Direct download	USD 11.99 plus USD 7.47 of weather packs	License for up to three Macs, fan control, macOS 11 and later
Mac App Store	USD 11.99 plus USD 7.47 of weather packs	Same app without fan control, macOS 14.0 and later
Setapp, Mac plan	USD 539.64 at the monthly rate	This app plus the rest of the Setapp catalog

The weather figure comes from the six months bundled with the license, leaving thirty months to cover with three 12 month packs at USD 2.49 each.

The Setapp column is only a fair comparison for someone who would use no other app in the catalog, which is an unusual case. The membership is priced against a library, not against one title, and annual billing lowers it further. The point of putting the three side by side is not to rank them but to show which question actually decides the answer: the choice is between owning one app and renting a collection, and the per app price barely enters into it.

One more variable belongs in this table for households. Because a single license already covers three Macs used by one person, and the Family Pack covers five in one home, the direct route gets cheaper per machine as machines are added, while a per Mac membership does not.

How billing works, and how to recover a lost license

Direct purchases are processed by Paddle rather than by the developer. The published privacy policy states that payment card details are handled by the payment processor and are not stored by Bjango. Purchases made through the App Store are handled entirely by Apple, which also means refunds, receipts and family sharing follow Apple rules rather than the developer's.

Buyers in Japan are charged in yen with consumption tax added, and Paddle issues the receipt showing the tax component separately. That detail matters for anyone claiming the purchase as a business expense, since the App Store receipt is formatted differently.

License keys go missing, especially for software bought once and reinstalled years later. There is a recovery form on the developer's help site: entering the email address used at purchase sends back the licenses associated with it, covering iStat Menus and the developer's other products in the same message. Knowing that this exists is worth more than it sounds, because the moment it is needed is usually the moment a new Mac is being set up and momentum matters.

What the 14 day trial should be used for

The trial is best spent verifying what the software can actually do on one specific Mac, rather than deciding whether the price feels fair.

Three checks are worth running. First, how many sensors are readable, and whether fan control behaves. The developer lists a known issue on M3 and M4 family Macs where fan control may not work correctly in situations where macOS has already turned the fans off. Second, whether the helper component is needed. Since 7.0 the app installs without an admin password and the helper is optional, but temperature and fan readings depend on it. Third, how many items actually fit in the menu bar on that machine.

A fourth check applies to anyone weighing the single license against the Family Pack. The license terms are written in terms of activations, three for a single license and five for the Family Pack, so the number to plan around is how many Macs will be running the app at the same time rather than how many exist in the house. Running the trial on each of those machines during the same two weeks is the quickest way to find out whether all of them are worth covering, since a Mac that gets used twice a month rarely justifies a slot.

The third check is the one that connects back to cost. Paying for detailed monitoring and then finding that only two of the nine items fit on a 14 inch laptop is a bad outcome that a trial reveals in minutes.

What to decide first

Price the whole menu bar, not one app. iStat Menus at USD 11.99 for up to three Macs is straightforward, but it sits alongside cloud storage, a password manager, a VPN client and everything else already holding a seat, and its own Combined mode cannot touch any of those icons.

Settle the display problem before paying for more things to display. Costs for a tool that collapses the entire bar are listed on Pricing, the behavioral differences that matter are set out on How it compares and Features, the common purchase questions are answered on FAQ, and a build to run alongside the iStat Menus trial is on Download.