Is it worth paying for…

Is it worth paying for CleanMyMac?

Last reviewed September 2026. Pricing and plans change; check CleanMyMac's own site for current figures.

Short answer: Not if you only want to know what is using your space. Finding the big folders, the big files, the duplicates and the things you last opened in 2019 is arithmetic over a folder listing, and this page does it for free without installing anything. Pay for CleanMyMac if you want the rest of the bundle: the uninstaller that chases an app's leftovers, the malware scan, the login item and launch agent cleanup, and the maintenance scripts. Those touch parts of macOS a web page cannot reach, and that is a real product. Just do not pay a yearly subscription for a treemap.

Where the paywall sits

CleanMyMac's own site advertises it from about US$3.33 a month, billed annually, with a seven day free trial of all 25 or so tools and a 30 day money back guarantee. MacPaw's support pages confirm the shapes on sale: a subscription, monthly or annual, which includes future major versions; a one time purchase, which covers the current major version only and charges again to upgrade; and inclusion in Setapp alongside 260 other apps. Per Mac pricing rises for two and five machine licences. Prices were read from macpaw.com and cleanmymac.com in September 2026; check them before you buy.

DaisyDisk deserves a fairer mention than most incumbents on this site. It is US$9.99, once, with a free trial and a 30 day money back guarantee, and its own site says plainly that it is "a one time purchase, and not a subscription". It is a beautiful, fast, native scanner, and if you are on a Mac and want a permanent desktop tool for the price of two coffees, it is a fair deal and we would not argue with you. The subscription is the thing worth resisting, not the category.

It is also worth saying that excellent free tools already exist on the desktop: WinDirStat and WizTree on Windows, GrandPerspective on macOS, and ncdu on Linux. This page is not claiming to beat them at what they do. It is here for the times you cannot or would rather not install anything.

What the free version here does

A treemap of the folder you pick, sized by what each folder actually uses, that you can click into and walk back out of.
The fifty largest files, with where they live and when they last changed.
A breakdown by kind: photos, video, audio, documents, archives, code, installers and disk images.
Duplicates matched on content, not on name. Files of the same size are compared by a hash of their first block, and only the ones that still match are read in full, so a renamed copy is found without reading your whole disk.
Large files you have not changed in six months, a year, two years or five.
A CSV of everything, for a spreadsheet.
On Chromium desktop, removing the files you tick. Each one is checked against what was scanned first, and anything whose size or date has changed since is left alone.
Works on Windows, macOS, Linux, and phones for reading. No install, no account, no admin rights, nothing uploaded and no server to upload to.

Open What's Eating My Disk — free, no account

When paying might still make sense

You want an uninstaller that finds the caches, preferences and launch agents an app leaves behind. A web page cannot see any of that.
You want malware scanning, login item management or macOS maintenance scripts.
You want something that lives in the menu bar and warns you before the disk fills, rather than a page you open when you notice.
You want to clear system junk, old iOS backups or mail attachments, which sit in protected locations a browser has no access to.
You are on a Mac, you want a native scanner permanently, and DaisyDisk's one off US$9.99 suits you better than opening a browser tab. That is a reasonable call.

How this one stays free

It runs entirely in your browser. There is no server to pay for, nothing is uploaded, and the code is open source. There is nothing to cancel because there was nothing to sign up for.

CleanMyMac is a trademark of its owner. This page compares products and is not affiliated with or endorsed by CleanMyMac.