Fork
fast native git client, one key for three machines
Perpetual
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.
Cost over five years
$60 once = 10 months of Tower. Over five years that is $345 rented against $59.99 owned — $285 kept, and you still have the app.
Tower priced at $69 a year — Basic individual plan, billed annually. Checked 2026-09-22.
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 it looks like
What it does
- Native Mac and Windows app that stays responsive on large repositories
- Interactive rebase for reordering, squashing and editing commits
- Built-in three-way merge conflict resolver
- Commit graph with blame, stash and reflog browsing
- Repository manager for people with many local checkouts
Cancel instead
Also bought outright in dev tools
The facts
- Price
- $59.99
- Licence
- Buy once, own forever
- What you get
- One payment. Updates included, indefinitely.
- Details
- $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.
- Free trial
- Yes
- On Setapp
- No
- Minimum macOS
- not stated
- Developer
- Dan Pristupov and Tanya Pristupova
- Price checked
- 2026-09-22
Check it yourself - Price band
- $30 to $60