Lifetime Mac
Files, disk & backup

ChronoSync

Defined, repeatable folder sync jobs with free major upgrades

Price: $49.99 once

PerpetualUpdates included, forever

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

The catch

Syncing to another Mac properly wants ChronoAgent, a separate $19.99 purchase

The full picture

ChronoAgent is bought per remote Mac, so a two-machine sync setup costs more than the headline price. The store lists ChronoSync as "From: $49.99", meaning multi-seat tiers cost more and the page does not spell out how many Macs a single licence covers - worth an email before buying if you have several. The interface is dense and dated next to newer sync tools, and it expects you to understand what your sync rules will do.

Pays back in
20 months
Seats
Not stated
Developer account
None needed
Buy once$49.99Rent 5 years$150

$100 kept over five years, and you still have the app.
Against GoodSync Personal at $30 a year, US$29.95 for a one-year subscription covering up to 5 devices; GoodSync no longer sells a perpetual licence. Also replaces Dropbox.

What it looks like

Images belong to their developers.

What you’re buying

ChronoSync is for the case where dragging folders in Finder has stopped being good enough and Time Machine was never the right shape. You define a job — this folder to that drive, bidirectional, skip these extensions, archive anything it replaces, run every night at eleven and also whenever the drive appears — and then you stop thinking about it. Targets can be a local disk, a network share, an SFTP server, an S3-compatible bucket or another Mac. It will also clone a volume, so it doubles as a backup tool for people who already own it.

The licence is the reason it sits high on this site. Econ Technologies write on their own product page that they never charge for new versions, and they have behaved that way across many years of releases. That is rare in this category, where paid major upgrades are the norm.

Two things to price in. ChronoAgent, which makes Mac-to-Mac syncing fast and reliable, is a separate purchase per remote machine. And the store quotes "From: $49.99", so check the seat count before you assume one licence covers the household.

The interface will not charm you. If you want one folder mirrored to one drive and nothing else, a simpler tool or a rsync line is less work than learning this.

What owners report

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

Praised

  • Owners repeatedly date their licences to 2005-2007 and are still running them, naming the free major upgrades as the reason they never moved.

Criticised

  • Most ChronoSync threads are someone trying to make a rule behave - deletions, renames and selective retention recur as the sticking points, and posters describe the setup as fussy.

Details

The price in full

From $49.99 for ChronoSync. ChronoSync Express, a cut-down sync-only version, is from $9.99, and ChronoAgent - needed for fast connections to another Mac - is a separate purchase from $19.99. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The ChronoSync page at econtechnologies.com
The developer’s own page. econtechnologies.com, captured 22 Sep 2026
Free trial
Yes
Works offline
Yes
Apple Silicon
Native
On Setapp
No
Minimum macOS
not stated
Developer
Econ Technologies

Also bought outright