Why I Built Klarity — A DaisyDisk Alternative for $6.99

It started with a full disk

My 256GB MacBook was almost out of space. I had maybe 10GB left, the "Storage Full" warnings were popping up daily, and I had no idea where it all went. Sound familiar?

I tried the built-in macOS storage manager. It told me "System Data" was using 45GB. That's it. No breakdown, no details, just a grey bar labelled "System Data." Not exactly helpful.

So I went looking for something better — an app that could actually show me what was eating my storage, visually, in a way I could understand at a glance.

The tools I tried (and why they fell short)

I looked into every disk analyzer I could find for Mac. DaisyDisk is the most well-known — it's been around since 2011 and has a loyal following. From what I could tell from screenshots, reviews, and demo videos, it relies on a sunburst chart (those colourful rings that fan out from the center). Sunburst charts look beautiful, but they have a known limitation: it's surprisingly hard to compare sizes between slices. Two slices can look almost identical even when one is three times bigger than the other. That comparison problem is well-documented in data visualization research, and it's what pushed me to look for a different approach.

GrandPerspective has been around forever but feels dated. OmniDiskSweeper just shows a plain list with no visual element at all. And CleanMyMac wants $30–50 per year as a subscription, which felt like overkill when all I wanted was to see my files clearly.

What I really wanted was something called a treemap — a view where every file and folder becomes a rectangle, and the rectangle's size matches the file's size. Bigger file, bigger rectangle. No guesswork required. On Windows, tools like WinDirStat have offered this for decades. On Mac? Nothing modern existed.

So I built it myself

Klarity started as a personal project — the disk analyzer I wished someone else had already made. A few ideas guided the design from day one:

Make it visual. Klarity has two ways to look at your storage. The treemap view shows your files as coloured rectangles — you can instantly see that your 12GB Xcode folder dwarfs your 800MB Photos library just by looking. The icicle view stacks horizontal bars to show folder depth, making it easy to compare everything sitting at the same level. No other Mac disk analyzer offers both views.

Make it fast. Nobody wants to stare at a progress bar for five minutes. Klarity scans over 100,000 files per minute. Point it at any folder or drive and you'll have a complete visual map of your storage in seconds.

Make it honest. No subscription. No hidden upsells. No "scan for free, pay to delete" tricks. $6.99 once, and the app is yours — every core feature included.

Why the treemap view is a game-changer

Here's the thing about treemaps that made everything click for me: you don't need to read numbers. Your eyes do the work.

When you open Klarity and scan your drive, you see a mosaic of rectangles. The biggest rectangles are your biggest space hogs — and you spot them in under a second. Hover over any rectangle to see the file name and exact size. Double-click a folder to drill into it. Right-click to reveal it in Finder or move it straight to Trash.

Compare that to scrolling through a long list of folders trying to remember which one was bigger. Or squinting at a pie chart wondering if that slice is 5GB or 15GB. The treemap just shows you the answer.

The icicle view — your secret weapon

Klarity's second visualization is the icicle view, and it's useful for a different reason. While the treemap is great for spotting the biggest files anywhere on your disk, the icicle view is perfect for comparing folders at the same level.

Say you want to compare Documents vs. Downloads vs. Desktop. In the icicle view, those three folders appear as side-by-side bars at the same height. You can see immediately which one is the space hog. Then look one level deeper and compare everything inside each folder — all without losing the bigger picture.

Think of it like an X-ray for your hard drive. You see the full skeleton of your file system at once.

Why $6.99 — and why no subscription, ever

DaisyDisk costs $9.99. CleanMyMac costs $30–50 per year. I priced Klarity at $6.99 because I wanted it to be an easy, no-brainer decision — less than a coffee and a sandwich.

And it's a one-time purchase. No subscription, period. Klarity runs entirely on your Mac — no cloud services, no servers, no ongoing costs on my end. Charging monthly for an app that does all its work locally just didn't sit right with me.

That said, I'm a solo developer and Klarity is something I plan to keep improving. Down the road, I may add more advanced features that take a significant amount of my time to build — things like duplicate file detection or smart cleanup suggestions. If and when that happens, I may choose to charge for those premium additions. But the core app you buy today is yours, and it will keep working and receiving updates.

One app. One price. No subscriptions, no telemetry, no nonsense.

Your files never leave your Mac

This was non-negotiable. A disk analyzer sees the name, size, and location of every file on your machine. That's sensitive stuff. You don't want that going anywhere.

Klarity makes zero network connections. It doesn't phone home, it doesn't send analytics or crash reports to any server, and it doesn't even check for updates over the internet — the Mac App Store handles that. Your file data stays on your Mac, full stop.

This isn't just a line in a privacy policy. The app literally has no ability to connect to the internet. There's no "trust us" required.

What you can do with Klarity today

The latest release of v1.0 just shipped, and here's what's inside:

• Treemap visualization — coloured rectangles showing file and folder sizes at a glance
• Icicle / flame graph view — stacked bars for comparing items at the same folder depth
• Move to Trash — right-click anything to trash it directly from Klarity, no need to switch to Finder
• Slide-to-unlock safety guard — when you try to delete a large folder (1GB or more), Klarity makes you slide to confirm before anything happens. This is important because files that are too large for the Trash bin get permanently deleted by macOS — so I built this extra step to make sure you never accidentally wipe something you meant to keep
• Live RAM monitor — see which apps are using the most memory, right from your menu bar
• Multiple volumes — scan your main drive, external hard drives, USB sticks — anything connected to your Mac
• Theme packs — because a utility app doesn't have to look boring

The workflow is simple: scan a folder, see what's taking space, and deal with it. No bloat, no 47-feature settings panel, no "Pro" tier upsell.

Who is Klarity for?

If you've ever seen the "Your disk is almost full" notification and thought "but I have no idea what's using all this space" — Klarity was built for exactly that moment.

It's great for anyone with an older Mac or a smaller SSD who needs to be smart about storage. For anyone who's tried other disk analyzers and wished they'd just show you the answer instead of making you dig for it. For anyone who doesn't want to pay a yearly subscription just to see what's on their own hard drive.

Klarity isn't a cleanup suite. It doesn't promise to magically free 50GB with one click. What it does is give you a clear, honest picture of your storage — and then gets out of your way so you can decide what to keep and what to toss.

If you try it, I'd love to hear what you think. And if you find it useful, a quick review on the App Store makes a huge difference for a solo developer like me. Thanks for reading.

— Mukul