🍄 Mushroom for iPhone is out on the App Store. One purchase covers your Mac and your phone.

For people who look up and it is 4pm

You dismiss reminders.
You don't ignore a pet.

Mushroom is a tiny pixel creature that lives on your Mac. It can tell when you are actually at the desk, so it nudges you to drink, move and rest your eyes at the moments that help, and stays quiet when they would not.

Made for people who sit at a Mac for hours. Developers, designers, writers, students, anyone whose focus is the problem and the job at the same time.

Download free 🍄 What it costs

Free for 7 days. It never asks you for an account or a card.

🔒 Runs on your Mac, not a server 🍎 Signed and notarized 📱 On your iPhone too 🌍 Five languages

What it actually is

A small creature, and the reason it works.

It is a Mac app. It puts a pixel mushroom in the corner of your screen, and that mushroom keeps an eye on how long you have been sitting there.

It knows whether you are at the desk

A timer app fires at 3pm whether you are there or not, so you learn to dismiss it. Mushroom reads how long it has been since you last touched the keyboard. Sixty minutes at the desk earns a nudge. Sixty minutes away earns nothing, because you already took the break.

It is a pet, and that is the mechanism

Muting a notification costs you nothing, which is why everyone eventually does it. Ignoring a creature that visibly droops when you skip your water is a different feeling, and cheering it up again takes one click. That is the whole reason it is still running on your Mac in month three, when the timer apps went in week one.

Nothing leaves the machine

Your reminders, notes, chats and stats live in one file on your own Mac. Even the conversation runs on a language model on the machine itself. There is no account to make and no server holding your day.

And it never makes you feel bad

No streaks to break, no red week, nothing that dies if you ignore it. A rough fortnight gets you a slightly droopy mushroom and a button that says you are fine. The app is built that way at the level of the rules it runs on, so there is no setting to find and nothing to opt out of.

A Mac desktop with the pixel mushroom standing quietly in the bottom right corner, just above the Dock.

That is the whole interface until it has something to say.

It watches the clock so you don't

You forget. It doesn't.

Six small nudges, timed around what you are actually doing, not a dumb timer shouting at an empty chair.

Water

A glass every hour, and it counts the ones you actually drank.

Breaks

After an hour at the desk. Time away resets it, so it never double asks.

Snacks

A quiet reminder that lunch was five hours ago.

Eye strain

Twenty seconds, twenty feet away, every twenty minutes.

Bedtime and quiet hours

A nudge at your cutoff, then silence until morning.

How you are

One tap. No journal, no questionnaire, no advice.

Everything Mushroom can do ›

The mushroom on a desktop with a panel above it. Two reminders are waiting, one to look twenty feet away and one to drink water, each with Done, Snooze and Skip buttons.

Every nudge offers Done, Snooze and Skip. Skip is an honest answer and costs you nothing.

It keeps learning

New tricks, same little mushroom.

Four of the things it picked up after 1.0. All of them free to everyone who already bought.

The Stats window: six months of activity as a grid of green squares, 156 done this week against 85 last week, and per habit bars for water, eye strain, breaks and mood.

A quiet week is never painted red. Nothing here is taken away for missing a day.

Click it, and it answers

Say "remind me in 2 hours to call Tom" and it just works. Ask "when is my next appointment?" and it tells you. The model runs on your Mac, so the conversation stays there too.

Focus sessions

Forty five quiet minutes. It holds every nudge until you are done, then picks up where it left off.

Streaks, stats and trends

What you actually did this week, in one panel. Gentle by design: a quiet week is never painted red.

The Stash

Links, notes and files you throw at the pet, kept in one place and synced to your phone.

The full list, including Friends and file sharing ›

How it is built

A companion, not a taskmaster.

No guilt, ever

Nothing here punishes you. There is no death, no broken streak, no red for a bad week. Ignore your mushroom for a fortnight and it droops slightly, and one click puts it right. A hard month should not be a thing your software has an opinion about.

Everything stays on your machine

Everything lives in one file on your Mac. No account, no telemetry, no analytics inside the app. The chat uses Apple Intelligence, or a model you download once, and either way the words never go anywhere. The two features that do send things between your own devices encrypt before they leave, forget within a day, and can be pointed at a server you run yourself.

Small, and well behaved

It never asks for Accessibility or Input Monitoring, because it does not read what you type. It reads one number the system already keeps: how long since you last touched anything. No Dock icon, no background nonsense, quiet when you are on a call.

Made by one person

Mushroom is built by one developer, with one advisor along the way. That is why the changelog is long and the roadmap is honest, and why an email to hello@getmushroom.app reaches the person who wrote the code.

Before you decide

Three things you can check yourself.

Every claim below has a link on the end of it, so you can go and check.

Every update has been free

Since 1.0, on both stores, to everyone who already bought.

Read the changelog ›

One purchase, five devices

Five Macs, with nothing to renew for the app itself. Your iPhone counts against the same five.

See what it costs ›

The servers are open source

The only two parts that touch a network. Read them, or run them yourself.

On GitHub ›

Pay once

Take one home.

Buy it once and it is yours, including everything it learns to do later. Try it first if you would rather.

$9.99

once, excl. tax

Start the 7 day trial 🍄

No account and no card to try it. One purchase covers up to 5 devices, Macs and iPhones together. Every future update included. Sales are processed by Gumroad.

Also on the App Store, at a different price, where one purchase covers your Mac and your iPhone. Answer three questions and we will tell you which one to buy ›

macOS 15 or later Apple Silicon iOS 18 or later for the iPhone app Small footprint on your disk

Before you download

The five things people ask.

Is this just another timer app?

No. A timer fires on a schedule whether or not you are there. Mushroom reads how long it has been since you last touched the keyboard, so it knows the difference between you working through lunch and you being at lunch. It waits.

What does Mushroom cost?

USD 9.99 excluding tax when you buy it here, or USD 5.99 on the App Store, which covers your Mac and your iPhone. Either way you pay once and it is yours. Every update since 1.0 has been free to everyone who already bought.

Does anything leave my Mac?

Your reminders, notes, chats and stats never leave your Mac. The chat runs on a language model on the machine itself. Two optional features send things between your own devices, and both are encrypted before they leave and can be run on your own server instead.

Is there a free trial?

Yes, 7 days on the version you download from this site, with no account and no card. The Mac App Store version has no trial, because there the purchase is the licence.

How many devices does one purchase cover?

Up to 5 devices, Macs and iPhones together. If a licence check ever fails because you are offline, Mushroom keeps working: it will not lock you out over a network problem.

All twenty questions ›