Lifetime Mac
Menu
Window management & desktop control

Bartender

Menu bar icons hidden behind a chevron, sold as a licence or a subscription

Price: $25 once

Paid upgradesMajor versions cost again

Buy direct Website

Price read on macbartender.com, the page Buy direct opens.

The catch

$24.99 buys Bartender 7 only; version 8 is a paid upgrade and Pro features are yearly

The full picture

This is the clearest paid-major-version cadence in the category: the 6-to-7 upgrade was discounted rather than free, so expect Bartender 8 to cost again. The Pro features — widgets, clipboard, notch file storage, Top Shelf — are behind the $19.99/year subscription and are not in the one-time licence. The Mega Supporter lifetime tier is the only single payment covering every future version, but its price is rendered client-side by Paddle and is currently discounted, so any figure quoted second-hand (including the widely repeated $80) is unconfirmed until you open the purchase page. All prices are localised and tax-inclusive by country. Bartender is also on Setapp, where it stops working when you cancel.

Pays back in
15 months
Seats
No Mac count statedA licence is for one user on all their Macs, not per machine.
Developer account
None needed
Buy once$25Rent 5 years$100

$75 kept over five years, and you still have the app.
Against Bartender Pro at $20 a year, the developer's own yearly tier, which adds the Pro suite and Top Shelf. Also replaces Setapp.

What it looks like

Bartender: Bartender's Settings window with its full sidebar visible (General, Menu Bar, Bartender Bar, Style, Automation, Hot Keys, Advanced, Widgets, License, About, and a 'Bartender Pro' section with Top Shelf), the Automation pane behind, and a 'Show Battery on Battery' trigger sheet in front: Check interval, When triggered (Activate profile / Show menu bar items / Show all items for app), Items to show, and a Power Source condition set to On Battery. The best single look at the app's real settings UI. 1200x676 JPEG.
Bartender's Settings window with its full sidebar visible (General, Menu Bar, Bartender Bar, Style, Automation, Hot Keys, Advanced, Widgets, License, About, and a 'Bartender Pro' section with Top Shelf), the Automation pane behind, and a 'Show Battery on Battery' trigger sheet in front. Vendor site (Bartender 7 announcement post)
Bartender: The Bartender 7 command bar popover over the desktop: a rounded search field reading 'Menu Bar Items' with a cmd-1 hint and four circular mode buttons, and below it the expanded result list - a search for 'Resur' matching the Resurf menu bar item (so.resurf.app) plus a CLIPBOARD section showing a recent rich-text clip with a timestamp. 1200x676 JPEG.
The Bartender 7 command bar popover over the desktop. Vendor site (Bartender 7 announcement post)
Bartender: The 'All Presets' pane of Bartender's settings in dark mode: rows for 'Default macOS menu bar items' (Built-in), Home, Image Editing, Media & Storage, Presenting and Work, each with a description and Activate / Edit buttons. Bartender 6-era but the pane still exists. 1292x654 PNG.
The 'All Presets' pane of Bartender's settings in dark mode. Vendor site (Bartender 6 product page)

Images belong to their developers.

What you’re buying

Bartender's job is narrow and it does it properly: you drag the icons you never look at into a hidden section, and the menu bar stops disappearing behind the notch. The parts you appreciate later are the Bartender Bar, a searchable second row you summon with a hotkey, and triggers that surface an icon only when it means something — the VPN icon when the tunnel is actually up.

The pricing is where to pay attention, because there are three doors. The $24.99 one-time licence is the one this site cares about: it buys Bartender 7 outright, includes every update within that version, and also activates the latest Bartender 6 if you are still on an older macOS. Bartender Pro, at $19.99 a year, adds widgets, a clipboard tool and notch file storage, and none of that reaches the one-time licence. The Mega Supporter tier is a single payment covering every version forever, but its price loads in your local currency and is currently marked as discounted, so read it on the purchase page rather than trusting a figure quoted anywhere else.

If you are on a Mac without a notch and have six menu bar icons, Ice does enough of this for nothing. Bartender earns the money when your menu bar is genuinely full and you want the triggers.

What owners report

Points that recur across the discussions below. A report of what users say, not our verdict: we don’t review software.

Criticised

  • The unannounced 2024 sale to Applause, and the analytics code that shipped just after it, is the reason owners give in thread after thread for no longer trusting an app that holds Accessibility and Screen Recording permissions.
  • Posters in the 2025 threads report the app got buggier after the handover, describing the Bartender 6 beta as a mess and bugs that survived several releases.
  • Asked what to use instead, forum regulars now answer with free options — Ice, Barbee, or macOS's own menu bar settings — rather than defending the purchase.

Details

The price in full

Bartender 7 is $25.00 one-time for a US buyer, read from the developer's own purchase page, which describes it as "One purchase, includes all updates to this version"; every tier lists "Includes Bartender 6 for Tahoe, and 7 for Golden Gate". Bartender Pro is $20.00 a year and adds the Pro suite and Top Shelf. The "Mega Supporter" lifetime tier, which includes Pro and all future versions forever, lists at $80.00 and carries a "Launch Discount" badge; a Mega Supporter upgrade for existing owners lists at $64.00. Prices are localised per country and rendered client-side, so what you see depends on where you are — the same page quotes a visitor in Portugal EUR 21.82 before VAT and EUR 26.84 with it. Four-week trial for new users, two weeks for returning ones.

The Bartender page at macbartender.com
The developer’s own page. macbartender.com, captured 22 Sep 2026
Free trial
Yes
Works offline
Yes
Apple Silicon
Native
Minimum macOS
not stated
Developer
Surtees Studios

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