NetVigil — Your Internet's Health, Right in the Menu Bar (macOS)

Always visible

Glance up. Know instantly.

A compact live readout — ↓ download / ↑ upload in Mbps next to a tiny sparkline of the last several seconds. You can tell whether traffic is flowing, whether it just spiked or stalled, without opening anything.

100% ↓84.2 ↑12.1Mbps 10:24

The sparkline is live — that's real movement, not a static image.

In the popover

Everything about your connection, one click away.

Click the menu-bar item and the full picture drops down — network, live stats, trend, quality, an on-demand speed test, and your outage history.

Your Wi-Fi at a glance

SSID, band (2.4 / 5 GHz), channel, and signal strength (RSSI / bars) — pulled live from CoreWLAN, right in the header.

Live download, upload & ping

The three numbers that matter, updated every second — each with an ⓘ tooltip that explains exactly what the metric means.

60-second chart

Recent throughput history so you see trends, not just the instant value — was that a one-off spike, or has it been crawling for a minute?

Connection quality pill

A derived Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor rating based on ping and recent drops — the honest verdict, color-coded.

One-click speed test

Runs a real download / upload / latency test against Cloudflare's endpoints, shows the result, and saves it to your history.

Drops today

Automatically detects and logs internet outages — when connectivity drops and returns — with timestamps and outage duration.

Pricing

Buy it once. Keep it forever.

A focused, far cheaper alternative to iStatMenus for people who just want to watch their connection — without another monthly bill.

7-day free trial · full features

$29.99

one-time unlock

No subscription. Pay once, own it on your Apple ID.

Live menu-bar readout with sparkline
Wi-Fi details, live stats & 60-second chart
One-click Cloudflare speed tests, saved
Automatic internet-drop log with durations
Free future updates

Start free trial

After the 7-day trial, NetVigil asks for the one-time unlock to keep running. No upsells, no tiers, no data harvesting.

FAQ

Good questions.

Why does the speed read near zero when I'm not doing anything?

Because there's genuinely no traffic. NetVigil measures real throughput by diffing your Mac's network byte counters once a second — it shows what's actually flowing, not your plan's rated speed. The instant you load a page or download a file, it jumps. To measure your line's full capacity on demand, run the built-in speed test.

How is this different from iStatMenus?

iStatMenus monitors everything — CPU, memory, disks, sensors, battery, network. NetVigil does one thing well: watch your internet connection's health. It's focused, lighter, and a one-time $29.99 instead of a subscription — for people who just want to see their connection at a glance.

What does it cost?

Free to download with a 7-day full trial. After that, a one-time $29.99 unlocks it forever — no subscription. It's a non-consumable App Store purchase tied to your Apple ID, so it follows you to new Macs.

Does NetVigil record or send my browsing data?

No. Throughput is read from local OS counters, Wi-Fi details come from CoreWLAN on-device, and your drop / speed-test history is stored locally with SwiftData. The only network traffic NetVigil itself initiates is the latency ping and the speed test you trigger against Cloudflare. See the Privacy Policy.

What are the system requirements?

macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later. NetVigil is a sandboxed Mac App Store app and runs as a menu-bar agent — no dock icon, no main window. It uses a sliver of CPU since it just reads counters once a second.

Your internet's health, always in your menu bar.