Hotspot Meter - A private data-usage meter for your Mac menu bar
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Hotspot Meter is a free macOS menu-bar app that shows exactly how much data each Wi-Fi network and phone hotspot uses. See live download and upload speeds, track session and per-network totals, review usage history, and get an alert before reaching your data cap. Everything runs locally on your Mac: no analytics, no accounts, and no personal data collected or transmitted.


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Dial
menu bar network meters are usually the first thing to break after a macOS update since they tend to rely on lower-level networking APIs that Apple quietly changes. has Hotspot Meter run into that yet, and if a future macOS update did break the live speed tracking, would people just see frozen/wrong numbers or would it fail more visibly than that?
Hotspot Meter
@omri_ben_shoham1 Not so far, although Hotspot Meter is still new and hasn’t yet had to cross a major macOS upgrade.
It reads the system’s interface byte counters using a longstanding public API. There’s no packet capture, kernel extension, or private framework involved.
If sampling failed completely, the live speeds would drop to zero and the usage totals would stop increasing rather than freezing on the last value. I’ll make sure to test Hotspot Meter thoroughly on the upcoming macOS 27 and continue testing against every future major macOS release.