Switch, restore & hide apps in a click
Click any app in the list to bring it forward — even a window you’d minimized to the Dock comes right back. Click it again to hide it: a quick way to jump between what’s running, right from the menu bar.
AppFreeze
A tiny menu-bar utility that suspends the background apps quietly draining your battery. How much you save depends on what you leave running — and on a heavy app you'd forgotten about, freezing cut ~85% of its drain in our tests. Start free on the Mac App Store, or unlock automatic freezing with Pro.
Download on theMac App Store
Free · macOS 14+
Upgrade to Pro
Unlock automatic freezing — pick a subscription or a one-time license.
Subscription
Available on Setapp
Already a Setapp subscriber? Get AppFreeze Pro as part of your plan — nothing extra to pay.
Open in SetappOne-time
Lifetime license
$19.99$9.99 onceLaunch price
Own it forever. Secure checkout, instant license and receipt by email.
Buy lifetime licenseLite vs Pro
The free Lite app shows you what’s running. Pro lets you act on it.
| Feature | LiteFree | Pro · SetappSubscription | Pro · LifetimeOne-time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freeze & save battery | |||
| One-click freezing | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Smart auto-freeze | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| True suspend, not quit (SIGSTOP — apps paused, not killed) | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Live energy monitor (per-app CPU) | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Per-app memory (RAM) | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Control your apps | |||
| Quit background apps | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Lock apps from freezing | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restore minimized windows from the Dock in one click | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Sortable list (by CPU / memory / freeze state) | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Customizable global shortcut | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Everyday essentials | |||
| Click to switch / hide an app | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Background apps monitor | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Menu bar app — one click to open or close | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Adjustable list size | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Launch at Login | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Trust & privacy | |||
| Safe by design | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Private — no account, no tracking | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free updates (within current major version) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Availability & pricing | |||
| Distribution | Mac App Store | Setapp | Direct download |
| Price | Free | Setapp plan | $9.99 once |
Setapp and Lifetime unlock the same Pro features — pick whichever billing suits you.
What AppFreeze Pro does
Everything the Lite monitor shows you — plus the power to act on it.
See where your battery goes
Background apps quietly drain power. Hit Freeze All and watch the draw fall.
Or dial it in, app by app
Freeze just the apps you don't need right now — each one trims the draw a little further.
For illustration only. These two clips are a demonstration of the idea, not a recording of
real measurements. The energy graph is a simulation — AppFreeze suspends apps to cut their CPU use; it does
not measure wattage, and actual battery savings vary by app and workload.
Activity Monitor is Apple’s own utility, shown here purely to illustrate the concept — it is not part
of AppFreeze.
Want the real numbers? We measured the actual effect on real
hardware — CPU power, battery drain, calibration. See the full methodology,
charts & raw data →
One-click freezing
Freeze every background app at once, or auto-freeze a remembered set. Suspended apps stop using the CPU instantly — no quitting, no losing your work.
Smart auto-freeze
Apps thaw the moment you switch to them and refreeze when you leave. You get the battery savings without ever thinking about it.
Live energy monitor
See real per-app CPU usage with a colour-coded Low/Medium/High indicator, so you know exactly which apps are draining your battery.
Sort the list your way
Click any column header — Name, %CPU or memory — to re-sort the list, ascending or descending. Surface your biggest battery hogs in one click.
Adjustable list size
Set how many apps the list shows — tap to grow it taller when you’re juggling everything, or keep it compact for just the essentials. The panel resizes to match, so it never takes more space than you need.
Quit background apps
Hover any app for a close button and shut it down right from the menu bar — with a quick confirm so you never lose unsaved work by accident.
Set it up your way
Record your own global freeze shortcut (or reset it to the default) and have AppFreeze ready in your menu bar the moment you log in — every setting tucked into one tidy panel.
Lock apps from freezing
Right-click any app to lock it — it stays unfrozen no matter what mode you switch to. A lock icon marks it at a glance; click the lock to unlock.
Safe by design
AppFreeze never suspends the app you’re using, Finder, or critical system processes — your Mac stays responsive at all times.
Under the hood
No memory cleaners, no magic — just how Unix already works.
Suspend, not quit
AppFreeze sends a SIGSTOP signal — the same primitive macOS
uses internally. The app freezes in place and its CPU drops to zero.
SIGCONT wakes it instantly, exactly where it left off.
Nothing is killed, nothing is lost.
Why Pro lives outside the App Store
Sending signals to other processes is a privileged operation Apple’s sandbox doesn’t allow. So Lite is a read-only monitor on the App Store, and the actual freezing lives in Pro — distributed directly and on Setapp.
Always safe
The app you’re using, Finder, the Dock and core system processes are never frozen — by design. Your Mac stays responsive at all times.
Apps, not system processes
AppFreeze manages the applications you opened — the ones you can see and chose to run. It deliberately leaves invisible background and system processes alone: you never launched them, so it’s not its place to touch them.