Hoardless
A native macOS disk cleaner that accounts for every byte. It shows exactly where the space went, and previews the paths and sizes of a cleanup before anything moves.
hoardlessWhat it is
Hoardless is a disk space analyzer and cleaner for the Mac. It indexes the whole machine once, then answers the question every cleaner skips: where did the space actually go, and what exactly am I about to delete?
The Storage Map sizes every folder by bytes on disk, and Investigate explains why a folder is as big as it is: the largest things inside it, the file types, how old they are, how much it grew since the last scan, and how much of it is reclaimable. Time Range compares what arrived inside a date range against everything else. Unused finds files, apps, simulators, Docker images, iOS backups and stale git worktrees you have not touched, using deterministic rules and two agreeing signals rather than a model’s guess. Dev Caches covers Xcode, Docker, Node, Homebrew, Cargo, Go, Gradle and Maven, plus the leftovers of Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Ollama, Hugging Face and LM Studio, and it uses each tool’s own removal command where one exists.
Every cleanup is a plan you read first. Items are sorted into what a tool will rebuild on its own, what you tick item by item, and what spells out the loss and asks again. Things go to the Trash by default and land in an undo log. Permanent delete is opt in.
Why I’m building it
I ran out of disk space on my own Mac often enough that it became a tax on the work. The existing cleaners all asked me to trust a progress bar and a number, and I did not want to trust anything with delete permissions that could not first show me the paths. Anti-CleanMyMac by design is the short version: scanning is the product, the cleanup is just the part you can audit.
The other reason is that it is the first thing I have built where an AI agent is a first-class user. I live in Claude Code and Codex all day, and those agents are the ones filling the disk with build output, model weights and abandoned worktrees. It felt backwards for them to have no safe way to see it.
Architecture
It is a native Swift 6 and SwiftUI app built entirely with Swift Package Manager, no Xcode project, so several people (and agents) can work on the repo in parallel without fighting a generated project file. The scan engine, the index, the Unused engine, the action engine and licensing live in a core library that the app, a CLI and an MCP server all share.
The index is a local SQLite database at ~/.hoardless/index.sqlite. No file contents leave the Mac, and the only thing
that ever goes out is a license activation: a key and a one-way machine hash, checked by a small Cloudflare Worker.
hoardless-mcp is a stdio MCP server that forwards to the running app over a local socket, launching it hidden if it
needs to, and falling back to read-only access on the index when the app is not reachable. It exposes sixteen tools: scans,
storage overviews, per-app costs, dev caches, unused items, date-range breakdowns, folder investigations and reclaim
previews. It can start a scan. It can never delete. The app ships an in-app connect pane that writes the config for
Claude Code, Claude, Cursor, Codex, VS Code, Windsurf and Zed, and an .mcpb bundle for Claude Desktop.
Distribution is direct: Developer ID signed, notarized, shipped as a DMG on Cloudflare R2, with Sparkle handling updates. It is not on the Mac App Store, because a sandboxed app cannot see app data sprawl, Mail, Messages or iOS backups, and cannot run a tool’s own cache cleanup command.
Tech stack
- App: Swift 6, SwiftUI, macOS 14+, universal build, Swift Package Manager only
- Core: scan engine, SQLite index, classification and rollups, Unused engine with deterministic detectors, action engine with an undo log
- Agents:
hoardless-mcpstdio server, 16 read and preview tools, 6 prompts, local socket to the app - CLI:
hoardless-scan, sharing the same index as the app - Licensing: Cloudflare Worker, one-time license, 14-day full trial
- Release: Developer ID, Apple notarization, DMG on Cloudflare R2, Sparkle 2 self-updates
Where it stands
Hoardless is pre-launch. The app is built and in daily use on my own machine, the site is up, and 1.0 is not downloadable yet. It will be a one-time purchase with a 14-day full trial, and scanning stays free after the trial: only reclaiming space needs a license. Disk watch alerts and the added-files timeline are the two pieces still in progress.