Cleanly: a free disk cleaner for Windows and macOS with no subscriptions

⚡ The gist in 5 seconds

• Cleanly is out — a free, open-source disk cleaner for Windows 10/11 x64 and macOS.
• There's an installer and a portable build for Windows, plus two .dmg images for Apple Silicon and Intel.
• The builds are unsigned: Windows triggers SmartScreen, and on macOS you need the xattr -cr /Applications/Cleanly.app command.

🔍 What happened

The project was published on GitHub by an author under the handle 0xCodez. The repo has 20 commits; under the hood are Electron, Vite, and TypeScript, with builds via electron-builder on Node.js 22 or newer. Downloads are available from GitHub: an installer and a portable version for Windows 10/11 x64, plus Cleanly-mac-arm64.dmg and Cleanly-mac-x64.dmg images for Mac.

Smart Scan estimates how much space will be reclaimed and immediately cleans the safe portion. Cleanup covers temporary files, browser caches (all profiles of Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox, Safari), app caches, crash reports, leftover updates, developer caches, the Trash, and old downloads. Groups are labeled Safe, Review, and Permanent. Space Map draws folders as bubbles sized by footprint — you can drill down into a bubble and toss it into another one.

The safety rules are handled the grown-up way. Caches, temp files, and logs are deleted for good, while anything the user selected — large files, duplicates, old downloads, apps — goes to the Trash. System folders are off-limits: disk roots, the home folder, Windows, Program Files, $RECYCLE.BIN, System Volume Information, network paths, symlinks, and junctions. The refusal logic even catches short Windows names like DOCUME~1 and trailing dots. Files in use and temp files younger than 24 hours are left untouched. Protection checks that Defender with the firewall or Gatekeeper, XProtect, and SIP are enabled. The Assistant sends the question “what can I delete?” to Claude or ChatGPT with your API key — only names, paths, and sizes go out.

🧠 Our take

Disk cleaners are an old genre with a tarnished reputation: subscriptions, “3000 errors found,” one “fix everything” button. Cleanly hits exactly that sore spot. Our assessment: there's no new technology here, but there is honest packaging — open code, zero analytics, zero ads.

Does it change anything? For the market, not much. The built-in Windows and macOS tools clear the same junk. The value lies elsewhere: you can see exactly what's being deleted instead of clicking blindly.

The winners are those who don't want to pay for a cleaner. The losers are the paid alternatives. What bothers me is the onboarding: an unsigned build asks you to hit “Run anyway” and run a Terminal command. And you're handing this app access to your files — not a great start. Also, Windows 10 is on the support list: it hasn't received security updates since October 14, 2025, and disk cleaning doesn't fix that.

⚠️ What we don't know

No benchmarks, no independent audit, no version number. A single author, and no tests visible in the description. How much space is actually freed and what criteria define “exact duplicates” — I won't take that on faith. The way to verify: install it on a test machine and see what ends up in the Trash.

Prediction: I'd bet that within a quarter, signed builds or packages in winget and Homebrew will show up. Without that, most people simply won't get past SmartScreen.

Source: GitHub / 0xCodez