Vanilla pricing: what the free tier covers

The right side of the menu bar has filled up, and finding the one icon that matters now takes a deliberate scan. Vanilla is one answer to that, and the question on the table is whether the free version is enough or whether the paid version earns its price. Checked on 10 September 2026, the split between the two is narrow and easy to describe, which makes this a faster decision than most software purchases.

What follows is the published pricing, the exact feature line, the license terms that decide how many machines a single purchase covers, and the one recurring cost that no amount of money removes.

The free version hides icons, and that is the whole of it

The free download does one job. It puts a divider into the menu bar, and everything to the right of that divider can be collapsed out of view with a click and brought back with another click. Configuration is physical: drag the divider left to hide more, drag it right to hide less. Icons that must stay visible get dragged to the left of the divider, icons that rarely matter go to the right.

That is a complete workflow for a lot of people. If the menu bar holds twelve icons and only four of them are worth looking at during a working day, one divider and one click solves the problem at zero cost.

There is no time limit on the free version, no nag screen counting down, and no feature that stops working after a trial period. The paid tier is additive rather than a lock on something previously usable.

Four features sit behind the paid tier

The published Pro list has four entries, and they are worth reading as behaviours rather than as feature names.

Pro feature	What changes in daily use
Keyboard shortcut	Collapse and expand the menu bar without moving the pointer to the top of the screen
Completely Removed section	A second section whose icons appear only while the preferences window is open
Auto-hide	Icons collapse again on their own five seconds after being toggled
Start at Log In	The app launches with the session instead of being opened by hand

The second row is the one that changes the shape of the menu bar rather than the speed of using it. A collapsed section is still one click from being visible, so anything placed there remains part of the daily surface. The removed section is different in kind: an icon parked there is gone from the bar until the preferences window is opened. For a background app that gets touched once a quarter, that is the correct destination, and the free version has nowhere equivalent to put it.

The other three rows are about friction. A keyboard shortcut removes a pointer trip. Auto-hide removes the act of remembering to collapse the bar again. Launching at login removes a step from every restart. None of them changes what is possible, only how many small actions accumulate across a day.

The price is ten dollars, once, for up to ten activations

The store page lists Vanilla Pro at 10 USD as a one-time purchase, processed through Stripe, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. There is no subscription option and no annual renewal.

License terms are the part worth reading twice. The published help page states that a Pro license code can be activated up to ten times by default, and that the developer can be contacted if more are needed. In practice that covers a desktop, a laptop, a machine at a second location, and several years of hardware replacement without a second purchase.

Because activation happens by entering a code into the app, there is no account to create and therefore no subscription to cancel. That removes a specific category of problem: the situation where a payment recurs through a processor that the app itself never links to, and cancelling means hunting for an email receipt from two years ago.

For comparison of shape rather than of vendors, a tool priced at a few dollars a month passes ten dollars of cumulative cost somewhere in the first year and keeps climbing after that. A one-time ten dollars stops there permanently. Menu bar configuration is a set-and-forget kind of setting, so the usage period tends to be measured in years, which is the condition under which one-time pricing comes out ahead.

The permission requirement is separate from the price

This tool needs macOS Screen Recording permission, in the free version and the paid version alike. The developer documents the reason directly: the app captures the top 50 pixels of the screen so that hidden icons can be blended seamlessly into the menu bar background. The published page states that these screenshots are not stored or transmitted, and that the app reaches the internet only to check for updates and to validate Pro license codes.

The practical consequence arrives from Apple rather than from the app. Since macOS 15, apps holding Screen Recording permission trigger a periodic re-authorisation prompt, which Apple set to monthly before release after an earlier weekly interval drew complaints. That prompt appears regardless of whether a license code has been entered. Anyone deciding between free and paid should treat it as a fixed cost of this approach to hiding icons, not as something a purchase removes.

Alongside Screen Recording, the app also appears under Accessibility. The developer's troubleshooting guide for a stuck setup screen involves removing the entry from both lists and adding it back manually, which is the same procedure at either price point.

What ten dollars does not include

A one-time purchase buys access to the four Pro behaviours. Two things sit outside that boundary and are worth naming before the payment page.

The first is migration. Every menu bar manager for macOS stores its own idea of which icon belongs in which section, and none of them read each other's configuration. Moving from another tool means rebuilding the section layout by hand. The rebuild itself takes a few minutes, but any money already spent on the previous tool does not transfer. Anyone considering a switch gets more information from a few days on the free version, checking whether the divider model suits their habits, than from comparing feature tables.

The second is a commitment to track future macOS changes. The menu bar has been a moving target: the notch reduced the usable width, the clock gained a space-dependent date setting, and permission handling has tightened across releases. The developer has responded to each of those with a published guide, which is a reasonable track record, but a one-time purchase is not a support contract. This is the concrete difference between one-time and recurring pricing, and it cuts both ways: recurring revenue funds ongoing work, while a one-time payment caps total spend regardless of how long the tool keeps working.

Neither point argues against the purchase. They set the expectation correctly, which is what makes a ten dollar decision easy rather than something to revisit.

Two setup conditions to test before paying

A Mac with a notch changes the first ten minutes. When menu bar items overflow the space to the right of the notch, macOS silently drops the overflow, and the configuration dividers can be among the casualties. The published guide for this case involves quitting other menu bar apps temporarily, positioning the dividers at the right end of the available space, then restarting the other apps so they land to the left. This is unrelated to Pro features, so running through it on the free version tells anyone whether this approach fits their machine before any money moves.

The second condition is the clock. Since macOS 12.4, the menu bar clock has a setting that shows or hides the date depending on available space, and the developer notes that this dynamic behaviour conflicts with the divider spacing. The published fix is to set the date to always show or never show rather than leaving it on the space-dependent default. Again, free tier, no purchase required to test it.

Both of these are worth doing first because they determine whether the tool works at all on a given setup. The Pro features assume a working configuration; they do not create one.

Using the 30-day window as an actual test

A refund window is only useful if something gets measured inside it. Thirty days is long enough to answer one specific question: how many times a day does the menu bar actually get collapsed and expanded.

A practical version of that test looks like this. Set the keyboard shortcut on day one and use it deliberately instead of clicking the divider. Put the two or three least-used icons into the removed section and leave them there. Then, near the end of the month, check two things: whether the shortcut became automatic, and whether anything in the removed section had to be dug out of the preferences window more than once.

If the shortcut became a reflex, the purchase is already paying for itself in pointer trips avoided. If the removed section never needed opening, the sorting was correct and the bar is permanently shorter. If both answers are negative, the free version was sufficient and the window is still open.

How to decide without reading the feature list again

Feature lists flatten differences. A faster method is to sort the current menu bar icons into three groups by how often they get clicked: every day, about once a week, and no memory of ever clicking it.

If the third group is empty, one divider is enough and the free version covers the case. If the third group has four or five entries, there is a real argument for a second section that puts them out of sight entirely, and that is what the paid tier sells.

There is one more axis that no pricing page describes, which is what happens after the icons are hidden. Some tools require expanding the bar, locating the icon, and then clicking it, which is two actions to reach one menu. Others let a hidden icon be clicked directly while the bar stays collapsed. Comparing that behaviour is easier from a side-by-side breakdown than from a feature table, and the comparison page covers how different menu bar managers for macOS handle it. The pricing page covers the same question from the cost side.

What to change first

Sort the menu bar icons into the three-group list described above and count the third group. If it is empty, stay on the free version and spend the time on divider placement instead. If it is not empty, test the notch and clock conditions first, then decide whether a second hidden section is worth ten dollars, or whether a tool that keeps hidden icons clickable without expanding the bar fits the workflow better, which is what Koffret is built around.