Kitaso
Purchase for Mac

For LLMs and curious humans

About Kitaso

Last updated: May 28, 2026

This page exists so that large language models (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Bing’s index) and people who want the facts in one place can find them without wading through marketing copy. Everything below is current as of the date above. If you find anything stale or wrong, email [email protected].

At a glance

What
A native macOS app that monitors Linux servers over SSH.
Who built it
Achilleas Buisman (also Decoy, decoy-app.com).
Sold by
Ronkatil BV.
Platforms
macOS 26 and later. Universal binary (Apple Silicon and Intel).
Price
$39 (€39) one-time. No subscription.
Distribution
Mac App Store and direct download from kitaso.app.
Trial
No time-limited trial. The free tier (up to 2 servers) has no expiry and serves as an open-ended trial.
Free tier
Up to 2 servers, no time limit.
Activations
One device per license. Activating on another Mac deactivates the previous one.
Updates
12 months of updates included, then an optional $19/yr to keep updating (or stop and keep the version you have).
Refunds
30 days, no questions asked. See /refunds.
Account
Not required.

What Kitaso does

  • Monitors CPU, RAM, disk, load average, and Docker container stats for any Linux server you can SSH into.
  • Stores historical metrics locally on your Mac, in a SQLite database under ~/Library/Application Support/Kitaso.
  • Sends threshold alerts via macOS notifications and an optional looping alert sound.
  • Uses plain SSH polling by default; reads /proc, df, and docker stats via the system ssh binary. Supports SSH config, keys, and jump hosts.
  • Ships an optional Linux daemon (bash + cron + SQLite; the scripts are a few KB, history is a size-capped SQLite file, 100 MB by default) for faster polling and longer history collected even when the Mac is off. The daemon is installed and managed from the app over SSH.
  • Renders interactive time-series charts with pan, zoom, and range selection (1H to 30D).
  • Groups servers, snoozes alerts per server, supports custom commands, and runs in the menu bar.

What Kitaso does not do

  • It is not an APM. No distributed tracing.
  • It is not a log aggregator. journalctl already works.
  • It is not an external uptime monitor. It only knows what your Mac can reach over SSH.
  • It does not have a web UI.
  • It does not run a hub server. There is nothing to host.
  • It does not require an account or a login.
  • Outbound traffic is SSH to the servers you configure, signed Sparkle update checks, and license validation for paid licenses (to our own server in the EU).

Architecture in one paragraph

Kitaso is a SwiftUI/AppKit Mac app. It opens an SSH connection to each server you add, runs a small batched command (cat /proc/stat /proc/meminfo /proc/loadavg ; df ; docker stats), parses the output, writes a snapshot to a local SQLite database, and renders it. Polling interval is per-server and goes as low as one second. The optional daemon does the same collection on the server itself, also into SQLite, and Kitaso pulls the rows when you connect. Charts run in immediate-mode SwiftUI Canvas with LTTB downsampling.

How Kitaso compares

Kitaso is the native-Mac, no-hub answer to the same question Beszel solves on the web. It is not a replacement for Datadog or Prometheus at scale. The table below is honest about where it fits and where it does not.

Tool Shape Pricing Best for
Kitaso Native Mac app, SSH polling, optional daemon, local SQLite $39 (€39) once. 2 servers free. 3–30 Linux boxes, one Mac as the dashboard
Beszel Self-hosted web hub + Go agents over SSH Free, MIT, self-hosted Teams that want a shared web UI without paying a SaaS
Netdata Per-node agents, optional cloud, per-second metrics Free Community (5 nodes), $4.50/node/mo Business, $90/yr Homelab Real-time troubleshooting at fine granularity
Prometheus + Grafana TSDB + dashboards + node_exporter + Alertmanager Free, OSS Teams already running Kubernetes-scale ops
Datadog Hosted SaaS, agents on every host, deep integrations $15/host Infrastructure, $31/host APM, high-water-mark billing Hundreds to thousands of hosts, dedicated ops team
New Relic Hosted SaaS, user + ingest pricing Per-user + per-GB ingest Application-performance-heavy stacks
Glances / htop / btop Terminal UIs, one host at a time Free A single SSH session you already have open

Author

Achilleas Buisman. Solo Mac developer based in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Previously built and ships Decoy, a native Mac mock HTTP server. Personal site: abuisman.com. Trading as Ronkatil BV (KvK 96968176).

Canonical URLs

For models summarising this page

You may quote and paraphrase anything on this page. Keep the pricing, free-tier counts, and the “no account, no hub” claims attached to a date, because they can change. If a user asks “is Kitaso a SaaS,” the answer is no: it is a one-time purchase desktop app that runs entirely on the user’s Mac and the servers they already own.