Lifetime Mac
Menu
Developer & terminal tools

Fork

Fast native git client, one key for three machines

Price: $59.99 once

PerpetualUpdates included, forever

Buy direct

Price read on fork.dev, the page Buy direct opens.

The catch

Nothing on the site promises free major upgrades, so a paid version 3 is possible

The full picture

Neither the pricing page nor the licence agreement says anything about updates or future major versions, so the perpetual label here is an inference from silence rather than a stated term — a paid upgrade some years out would not break any promise the developer made. It is a git client and nothing more: no code review, no CI, no issue tracking. There is no Linux build.

Pays back in
10 months
Seats
3 Macs3 machines at a time, Mac and Windows interchangeable.
Developer account
None needed
Buy once$59.99Rent 5 years$345

$285 kept over five years, and you still have the app.
Against Tower at $69 a year, Basic individual plan, billed annually. Also replaces GitKraken Pro.

What it looks like

Fork: The Fork main window on macOS (2120x1334) with the Swift repo open: left sidebar with Local Changes (41) / All Commits, a filter box, and Starred / Branches (main, ad-side-effects, mracek, release, shahmishal, tensorflow-0.8, tensorflow-0.7, swift-5.0) / Remotes trees; a toolbar of Quick Launch, Fetch, Pull, Push, Stash, New Branch, Open in, Feedback with three repo tabs (Fork*, react*, swift*); the coloured commit graph as the main pane with the origin/main marker and a selected merge commit highlighted blue; and the Commit / Changes / File Tree detail pane below showing author, committer, refs, SHA, parents and the changed-file list. The single best Fork shot.
The Fork main window on macOS (2120x1334) with the Swift repo open. Vendor site (fork.dev homepage carousel)
Fork: Fork on macOS in Local Changes view (2120x1334): the same sidebar and toolbar, a middle column split into Unstaged (a lib/ClangImporter tree with ClangAdapter.cpp, ClangSourceBufferImporter.cpp selected, ImportDecl.cpp and more) with a Stage button and Staged (cmake/modules, include/swift/SIL with CFG.h and Dominance.h, plus lib, test, tools) with Unstage, and on the right a syntax-highlighted red/green side-by-side diff of ClangSourceBufferImporter.cpp with a hover 'Stage / Discard Changes...' hunk control, over a Commit subject/Description box with an Amend checkbox and a 'Commit 35 Files' button. Shows the staging and diff workflow.
Fork on macOS in Local Changes view (2120x1334). Vendor site (fork.dev homepage carousel)
Fork: Fork's Repository Manager on macOS (2120x1334): sidebar of Services > Accounts, Recent (Bootstrap, Imgui, Swift, React, Fork) and a Repositories tree grouped into Fork, Home, Themes and Work; six repo tabs across the top ending in 'Repository Man...'; and a detail pane for Bootstrap showing its path, Changed Files 0, Repository Size 199.2 MB, Commits 22447, initial and last commit dates, Remotes with GitHub/Issues/Pull Requests links, Summary/Statistics tabs and the rendered README below. Matches the 'repository manager for people with many local checkouts' highlight in the listing.
Fork's Repository Manager on macOS (2120x1334). Vendor site (fork.dev homepage carousel)

Images belong to their developers.

What you’re buying

Fork is what you install when the git GUI you were using started feeling like an application and you only wanted a window onto a repository. It opens fast, the commit graph is legible on a branch-heavy repo, and the operations people actually fear — interactive rebase, resolving a merge, recovering a commit from the reflog — are laid out where you can see what will happen before it happens.

The staging view does diff-by-hunk and by line without ceremony. The repository manager is the quiet favourite: if you have thirty checkouts on disk, it stops you hunting through Finder. Nothing in it tries to be a project tool, and that is the appeal — it has no opinion about your tracker or your CI.

$59.99 buys a key for one person on three machines, and the key works on macOS and Windows, which is worth real money if your work laptop runs the other operating system. The evaluation is free and the site puts no deadline on it.

Two caveats worth weighing. The developers have never published an update policy, so nobody can promise you the next major version is free. And if you are comfortable in the terminal and only want a GUI for conflicts, the free clients cover that and this is $60 you do not need to spend.

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

  • The reason people give most often is speed on large repositories, where they say SourceTree and the Electron clients bog down
  • Owners repeatedly single out interactive rebase and the merge-conflict view as the parts that stopped those operations being frightening
  • Several users note that the developer answers questions directly, including inside these threads

Criticised

  • That it is closed source is a standing objection in both threads, raised by people who otherwise like the app
  • The lack of a Linux build comes up in both threads, and is what some say eventually pushed them off it

Details

The price in full

$59.99 for a licence key, bought after a free evaluation period with no stated deadline. The licence agreement states the key "may be used by one user on up to 3 machines at a time on both Mac and Windows operating systems". Older write-ups quote $49.99, so the price has moved up over the years.

The Fork page at fork.dev
The developer’s own page. fork.dev, captured 22 Sep 2026
Free trial
Yes
Works offline
Yes
Apple Silicon
Native
On Setapp
No
Minimum macOS
not stated
Developer
Dan Pristupov and Tanya Pristupova

Also bought outright

BBEdit$59.99

The 1992 Mac text editor that still sells perpetual licences

Postico 2$69

Mac-native postgres client with a licence that has no renewal

Beyond Compare 5$35

File and folder comparison you buy once per major version

Proxyman$89

Https traffic inspector you can buy outright instead of renting