The app
How it decides what is safe
Everything the scan finds carries a rating for what cleaning it costs you — and that rating, not a button, decides what can be cleaned in bulk and what cannot.
The four levels
- Safe for auto removal. Regenerates on its own. Cleaning confirms, then deletes.
- Review before deleting. Regenerates, but costs you a rebuild, a re-download or an app restart. Simulator runtimes live here.
- Backup recommended. Your data. There is no bulk clean at all: the button opens the list and you pick items one at a time, or move them to another drive.
- Protected. Cannot be deleted from here — your Photos library, macOS temp data. The row tells you what to do instead.
The point of the rating is that it is not advice. It is wired to what the interface will let you do, so a red flag cannot be cleaned in bulk however hard you click.
What it will not do
- Delete anything without a confirmation, ever. There is no one-click clean-everything.
- Touch a category whose app is open. Deleting a build tree during a build breaks the build, so a scheduled clean skips it and says so.
- Empty the Trash on a timer. The Trash is the undo for everything the app moves there.
- Count the same bytes twice. A folder another category already claims is left out of the broader one, so the totals add up.
- Remove the last copy of anything. In both duplicate finders one copy of each file is kept and is never even listed, so cleaning everything on screen cannot take the last one.
Measured, not estimated
Every figure comes from your own Mac. The disk gauge is your disk; the memory reading is your kernel's own statistics — on the machine this was built on, 18.09 GB held in 4.83 GB. Where a measurement cannot be made honestly the app says so rather than filling the gap: that is why there is no RAM purge button and no malware scan, and why each is replaced by the number it would have acted on.
A worked example: pictures saved twice
The picture finder was first built on Apple's own image-similarity model. Measured against a thousand real pictures it called two different bills, two pages of one report and two frames of one contact sheet the same picture — so it was rebuilt to compare pixels instead, and now claims only that it finds the same picture saved again. It misses a crop, and says so, rather than guessing and offering your photographs.
What to do next: see these numbers for your own Mac. Download RefreshYourMac free, or get it on the Mac App Store.
What it costs to have an app do this
| RefreshYourMac | CleanMyMac | MacKeeper | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay once | $24.99 | €119.95 on MacPaw’s store; $89.99 for CleanMyMac X on the Mac App Store | subscription only |
| Yearly | $14.99 a year, first 7 days free | $39.99/yr on the Mac App Store; €39.95/yr on MacPaw’s store | €71.40 for the first year, 1 Mac. Their page shows it against a €119.40 list price |
| Monthly | $1.99 a month | $9.99/mo | €10.95/mo |
| Account needed | No | Yes | Yes |
Before you pay anything, both versions give you 3 free scans. CleanMyMac and MacKeeper prices read from their own pages and the Mac App Store on 27 October 2026; the full comparison is at RefreshYourMac vs CleanMyMac and MacKeeper.
Frequently asked questions
How can you tell what is safe to delete on a Mac?
Ask what cleaning it costs you. Some things regenerate on their own and cost nothing; some regenerate but cost a rebuild, a re-download or an app restart; your own data should be moved or picked one item at a time; and some places, such as the Photos library, should not be deleted from at all.
Why should a cleaner never empty the Trash automatically?
The Trash is the undo for everything a cleaner moves there. Emptying it on a timer would take that undo away, which is why emptying the Trash should stay a choice you make yourself rather than a scheduled job.
Can a duplicate photo finder flag pictures that are not duplicates?
One built on Apple’s own image-similarity model, measured against a thousand real pictures, called two different bills, two pages of one report and two frames of one contact sheet the same picture. Comparing pixels instead finds only the same picture saved again, at the cost of missing a crop.
Does RefreshYourMac delete anything without asking?
No. Nothing is deleted without a confirmation, and there is no one-click clean-everything. It will not touch a category whose app is open, keeps one copy of each duplicate unlisted so the last copy cannot be taken, and never counts the same bytes twice.