Privacy, security & networking
Your Mac tells you when the camera is on: the green light, and the dot in the menu bar. It is much quieter about the microphone, and it never tells you which app is responsible. Micro Snitch fills that gap for less than the price of a coffee. Something starts recording, the menu bar icon animates, and the log records the app name and the time.
The log is the part that earns the four dollars. It is how you discover that a conferencing app holds the microphone open for twenty minutes after a call ends, or that a browser tab grabbed the mic during a page you did not expect. Reading it back a day later is more informative than any alert in the moment.
Understand what it is not. It cannot deny access — that is System Settings' job, or Little Snitch's for the network side. It is a smoke alarm, not a lock.
Buy it if you are the sort of person who wants the receipt of every recording session on your machine. If you already check the privacy indicators and trust the handful of apps with mic permission, macOS is telling you enough and this adds a second menu bar icon for nothing.
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