ChatPC
ChatPC is a native macOS AI agent that lives in your menu bar and automates your Mac through plain conversation, acting on Finder, Mail, Calendar, Notes, Safari, Shortcuts and AppleScript, with per-action approval and a permanent free tier.
What is ChatPC?
ChatPC is an AI agent that installs into the macOS menu bar and turns instructions written in plain English into real work on your Mac. You describe a task — tidy this folder, answer from these documents, reply to this message, find me a slot next week — and the agent carries it out inside the applications you already use.
Everything it can do is expressed as an action, enabled individually under Settings > Actions. A set of recommended actions is offered the first time the chat window opens, and the trade-off is stated openly: the more actions you switch on, the more credits each message consumes. Each action carries its own permission — allow, ask for approval, or block — so an agent that can rename and move files never does so unsupervised unless you decide it should.
The native reach covers Finder, Calendar, Mail, Notes and Safari. Zoom sits behind a separate OAuth authorisation that you can revoke from the settings. Point ChatPC at a folder through Settings > Actions > Finder and enable Knowledgebase, and that folder becomes a local corpus you can question directly. Anything the built-in actions miss can be added without waiting for the vendor: ChatPC runs your macOS Shortcuts, and it runs AppleScript or JXA files placed in a designated folder, provided each script opens with a tagged comment block declaring its permission, summary, parameters and return type. The traffic also flows the other way — a Shortcut or a script can prompt ChatPC in the middle of a longer workflow.
Smaller touches show the same desktop-first instinct: text selected in the frontmost window pre-fills the input, and Control-Space opens the chat from anywhere. Models are gpt-3.5-turbo and gpt-4o, billed in credits, and every paid plan lets you drop in your own OpenAI or Anthropic key to bypass the meter. A companion ChatPC GPT connects macOS to ChatGPT and brings web access and the code interpreter, though it requires a ChatGPT Plus subscription.
It needs macOS 13.0 or later, grants of Accessibility and app-control permissions, and arrives as a .zip from the project's GitHub releases rather than the Mac App Store.
What it does
- Organise and rename files according to what is actually inside them
- Answer questions about a local folder turned into a searchable knowledgebase
- Draft, reply to and rewrite messages in Apple Mail
- Sort unread mail and separate junk from what deserves an answer
- Create, move and delete Zoom meetings, then email the invitations
- Find a free slot in Calendar and schedule the event around it
- Summarise a local PDF or the Safari page currently in front of you
When to use ChatPC / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if ChatPC is the right fit.
When to use ChatPC
- Mac users whose working day runs through Finder, Mail, Calendar and Notes
- Executive assistants and office managers who triage email, juggle calendars and file documents
- Freelancers and solo founders with no support team behind them
- Students and teachers who want quizzes drawn from their own notes and summaries of local PDFs
- Technically curious users who already build Shortcuts or write the odd AppleScript
When not to use ChatPC
- Windows and Linux users, since ChatPC requires macOS 13.0 or later
- Anyone looking for a phone app: no iOS or Android version exists
- Teams that need seats, single sign-on, shared roles or centralised billing
- Buyers whose procurement demands a DPA, SOC 2, ISO 27001 or a published subprocessor list
- Developers who want to drive the tool through a public API, which ChatPC does not offer
How to use ChatPC
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Download the macOS .zip from the ChatPC documentation
- Unzip it and move ChatPC into your Applications folder
- Open the app — it appears in the macOS menu bar, at the top right of the screen
- Click Sign up and finish registration in the browser window that opens
- Accept the recommended actions when the chat window first appears
- Grant the macOS permissions it asks for as you go, starting with Accessibility
- Open the chat window from the menu bar icon, or with Control-Space
- Start with something small, such as creating a folder named after today's date and writing a file into it
- Approve the actions that ask for confirmation before they run
- Add your own capabilities: Shortcuts, AppleScripts under Settings > Actions, and personal API keys under Settings > General
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Acts on real macOS applications and files rather than only on text in a box
- An approval gate on every action, which matters when an agent can move your documents
- States plainly that your data never trains AI models, and encrypts traffic to OpenAI
- Extensible without writing code: a Shortcut is enough, AppleScript goes further
- Works in both directions, so your own scripts can call the agent mid-workflow
- Permanent free tier of 50,000 lifetime credits with every paid feature included
- Low prices, from USD 5 a month, with two months free on annual billing
Cons
- macOS 13.0 or later only — no Windows, no Linux, no mobile build
- Ships as a .zip from GitHub releases rather than through the Mac App Store
- Slow release cadence: v0.44 dates from 26 July 2025 and the footer still reads 2024
- Credit billing is hard to forecast, since each action you enable raises the cost per message
- No public API and no team features: seats, single sign-on and shared billing are all absent
- No DPA, SOC 2, ISO 27001 or subprocessor list, and no hosting country is disclosed
- No legal entity, no postal address and a single email as the only contact channel
Pricing & Plans
ChatPC offers a permanent free plan, capped at 50,000 lifetime credits and 75 GPT actions, which includes every paid feature. The lowest paid entry point is the Basic plan at USD 5.00 per month, or USD 50.00 per year, annual billing being equivalent to two months free. No time-limited free trial is offered.
- lifetime cap of 50
- 000 credits and 75 GPT actions
- all paid features included
- 5
- 000
- 000 credits and 200 GPT actions per month
- 12
- 000
- 000 credits including a 2M bonus
- and 500 GPT actions per month
- 19
- 000
- 000 credits including a 4M bonus
- and 1
- 500 GPT actions per month
- Every paid plan accepts your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key
- which bypasses ChatPC credits entirely
- 1M credits is roughly 750
- 000 input words on gpt-3.5-turbo
- or about 75
- 000 on gpt-4o
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how ChatPC handles your data.
GDPR overview
The privacy policy, last updated 10 June 2023, carries a dedicated GDPR section and names the company as data controller. It lists six legal bases — consent, performance of a contract, legal obligations, vital interests, public interest and legitimate interests — and enumerates rights of access, rectification, objection, erasure, portability and withdrawal of consent, plus the right to complain to a supervisory authority in the EEA. A separate CCPA/CPRA section addresses California residents. Implementation stops there: no Article 27 EU representative is designated, no data protection officer is named, and there is no data processing agreement, no standard contractual clauses and no subprocessor list. Requests go to one generic address, support@chatpc.ai. Fetched from a Swiss exit address, the policy served a single version with no regional variant.
Who owns the data?
The terms keep the service, its original content, features and functionality as the exclusive property of the company and its licensors, while explicitly carving out content provided by users. Feedback is the exception: you assign all rights, title and interest in any suggestion you send, and should that assignment fail you grant a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free worldwide licence instead. For personal data the company declares itself controller under the GDPR and says it collects an email address and usage data. That data may reach service providers, group affiliates, an acquirer in a merger or asset sale, and public authorities on a valid request. The homepage states your data never trains AI models.
Reuse rights
Nothing in the terms restricts what you do with what ChatPC produces for you. The intellectual property clause covers the service itself and expressly excludes content provided by users, so the files it reorganises, the drafts it writes and the answers it returns remain yours to reuse, publish or sell without asking permission. Two caveats deserve attention. Feedback you send about the product is assigned to the company in full, so a workflow idea you volunteer stops being exclusively yours. And because the agent works on local files you already own, the real constraint is not licensing but the meter: every exchange spends credits, input and output words alike, with generated words costing roughly three times what prompt words cost.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
No hosting country or region is named anywhere on the site. The privacy policy says personal data is processed at the company's operating offices and in any other place where the parties involved are located, and that it may be transferred to and held on computers outside your own jurisdiction, where data protection law may differ. The California, United States reference that appears in both legal documents defines the governing law, not a storage location. Named third parties are Google Analytics, Firebase and Stripe, each introduced with "we may use", so the list is indicative rather than binding, and prompts are processed by OpenAI over what the homepage describes as encrypted connections. One clarification matters: the site itself resolves to an anycast Fastly node in front of GitHub Pages, which describes where the brochure pages are served and says nothing about where user data lives. No DPA, standard contractual clauses or subprocessor list are published.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting ChatPC.
- The agent holds Accessibility and app-control permissions, which is very broad reach over the whole machine
- A misread instruction can move, rename or delete personal files — the vendor's own example prompt tells the model to skip anything it is unsure of
- Automatic mail sorting can classify a legitimate message as junk and quietly bury it
- The contents of local files and emails are sent to a third-party model in order to be processed
- Credit consumption is hard to anticipate, because every action you enable raises the cost of each message
- Thin governance — no DPA, no certification, no legal entity, one contact address — leaves little recourse if something goes wrong
- Delegating filing and drafting erodes your own grip on where your documents are and how your writing sounds
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Straightforward for the basics, with two steeper steps. Installation is manual — download a .zip, unzip, drag to Applications, create an account in the browser — because the app is not on the Mac App Store, and macOS permissions including Accessibility are granted as you go. After that, ordinary use needs no configuration: you type an instruction in plain language. Turning a folder into a knowledgebase means a short detour through Settings > Actions > Finder. Writing your own AppleScript actions is the genuinely technical part, since each script needs a correctly tagged comment block and a properly named main function.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind ChatPC
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Which platforms does ChatPC support?
Which applications can it actually control?
What is a credit?
Is there a free plan?
How much do the paid plans cost?
Can I use my own API key?
Is my data used to train AI models?
How do I stop it acting without my consent?
Can I add capabilities the vendor has not built?
Is there a minimum age, and how do I reach support?
Should you pick ChatPC?
ChatPC answers a narrower question than most AI assistants, and answers it more concretely: instead of talking about your work, it operates the Mac you already work on. That distinction is the whole value. A web chatbot can draft the email; ChatPC reads the unread inbox, sorts it, writes the reply, files the attachment and books the follow-up in Calendar.
Two design choices deserve credit. The per-action permission model — allow, ask, block — is the right answer for software trusted with a home folder, and the stated refusal to train models on user data is unusually plain for a tool that necessarily reads private files. The extensibility is the other genuine strength: because any Shortcut or AppleScript can become an action, and because scripts can prompt the agent in return, a Mac power user is not waiting on the vendor's roadmap.
The reservations are about the vendor, not the product. Version numbering sits below 1.0, the most recent release dates from July 2025, the footer still reads 2024, and distribution happens through a GitHub .zip rather than the Mac App Store. Governance is thinner still: no legal entity, no postal address, one support address, and none of the DPA, certification or subprocessor disclosure that a compliance review would ask for. Credit-based billing adds a further unknown, since enabling more actions quietly raises the cost of every message.
The verdict splits cleanly by audience. For an individual Mac user curious about real desktop automation, the permanent free tier makes the experiment nearly costless and the ceiling is USD 15 a month. For an organisation with procurement requirements or a mixed fleet of machines, the gaps are structural rather than temporary.
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