A small app for Windows and Mac that shows where your memory goes and clears the caches you can safely lose.
Your computer has plenty of RAM and it's still slow. Ballast sits in your system tray or menu bar, watches memory and disk, and tells you two things:
- Which app is hogging memory, and lets you quit it in one click.
- Which caches you can delete without breaking anything.
It never deletes anything you didn't tick and confirm.
There are no prebuilt downloads yet, so you build it from source. It takes about a minute.
| Windows | Mac | |
|---|---|---|
| You need | Windows 10 or 11 and the .NET 10 SDK | macOS 14 or later and Xcode 26 or later |
| Run | git clone https://github.com/tekcify/ballast.gitcd ballast\windows.\build.ps1 |
git clone https://github.com/tekcify/ballast.gitcd ballast./build.sh |
| It lands in | Your user folder and the Start menu, no admin needed | Your Applications folder |
Either way, Ballast starts with your computer from then on. You can turn that off in Settings.
On Windows, click the tray icon to open it. If Windows tucks the icon into the overflow arrow, drag it onto the taskbar so it stays visible.
Memory. A live breakdown of what's using your RAM, with apps grouped together so Chrome's dozens of helper processes show up as one row. Under "The move", Ballast suggests what to quit, based on how much an app uses, how long since you touched it, and whether its memory keeps climbing. It won't suggest anything the system needs, and it won't tell you to quit the app you're using unless things are critical.
Quitting asks nicely first: apps get their windows closed so they can save, and on Windows a console tool like a dev server gets Ctrl+C, just like pressing it in its terminal. Only what's still running after a few seconds is ended, and anything still showing a window, usually a "save changes?" prompt, is left for you. Before ending anything, Ballast checks the process is the same one it saw, since Windows reuses process IDs. Windows services never get a Quit button; Ballast points you to the Services app instead.
A heads-up. When memory runs low, Ballast tells you without stealing focus. On Windows a small card appears above the tray. On a Mac it drops out of the notch. Dismiss it and it stays quiet for 15 minutes, or snooze it for an hour.
Storage. One scan finds developer caches and ranks them biggest first: npm, pnpm, Yarn, Bun, pip, uv, Go, Cargo, Gradle, Maven, NuGet, Playwright, Xcode, Next.js, Turbo, Vite and more, plus temp files and the Recycle Bin or Trash. Smart pick ticks the safe ones for you.
On the Mac, Open manager gives the scan a window of its own. Results are sorted into caches, build output, dependencies, simulators and emulators, AI tool files, app data and your own files. Pick any row to see what clearing it does, when you last used it and the biggest things inside it.
On the Mac, a few extras:
- A live graph of memory over the last 20 minutes, tinted where it got cooked. Put a small version of it in the menu bar if you like.
- Make room quits every app Ballast suggests in one go and tells you how much came back.
- An app that keeps leaking gets Restart instead of Quit, so you get the memory back without losing the app.
- Last 24 hours logs every time memory got cooked and which apps were heaviest, so the usual suspect stands out.
- Right-click any app to restart it, copy its process IDs or tell Ballast to never suggest quitting it.
- Ballast keeps an hourly record of free disk space and warns you when the disk is on track to fill up within two weeks.
⌘1⌘2⌘3switch tabs,⌘Ffilters apps and⌘Rrefreshes or rescans.
Every cache gets a tier:
| Tier | What it is | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Safe | Rebuilds itself | Deleted, and picked for you |
| Rebuilds | Costs a download or a rebuild | Moved to the Recycle Bin or Trash |
| Careful | Your real stuff | Moved to the Recycle Bin or Trash, never picked for you |
| Kept | Measured only | Never deleted |
On top of that:
- Ballast only deletes inside your home folder, apart from emptying the Recycle Bin or Trash when you pick it. Documents, Desktop, Pictures, OneDrive,
.git,.sshand AI assistant folders are always off limits. A project cache inside one of them, say a Next.js cache in a project on your Desktop, still shows up so you know the space is there, but it's listed as Kept and never ticked. - A project with a running dev server keeps its cache. Ballast checks again right before deleting.
- Anything written to in the last 10 minutes is never picked for you.
- Every deletion is logged, so you can see exactly what went.
Ballast can print what it sees and exit. The storage check is a dry run and deletes nothing.
Windows (PowerShell):
& "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\Ballast\Ballast.exe" --diagnostic snapshot | Out-Host
& "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\Ballast\Ballast.exe" --diagnostic scan | Out-HostMac (Terminal):
BALLAST_DIAGNOSTIC=1 /Applications/Ballast.app/Contents/MacOS/Ballast
BALLAST_DIAGNOSTIC=scan /Applications/Ballast.app/Contents/MacOS/BallastBug reports, new cleanup targets and fixes are welcome on either platform. CONTRIBUTING.md explains the setup. Please report anything that could delete the wrong files privately, as described in SECURITY.md.
MIT © 2026 Tekcify Technologies Ltd