Other Mac break apps tell you to take a break. Deskthaw shows you what to do for the part that hurts: one short stretch, most under two minutes. It lives in the menu bar and waits until your call is over or you leave fullscreen.
Free to join. Preorder below for $29 if you already know you want it.
On Windows or Linux? Join anyway. Mac ships first. If we build the other two later, one licence covers all of them.
Grey means Deskthaw is staying out of your way. Ember means you have a minute and it has a stretch for you. Most days that dot is the only part of it you'll see.
Neck reset
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A break opens in a small window you can move or skip. It never takes over your screen.
The paid break apps on the Mac can all pause for a meeting now, and the free ones can't. Either way, none of them ask what hurts. You get a timer, or a one-line prompt, and a stiff neck is still a stiff neck. Deskthaw asks first, then shows you a guided stretch for the neck, shoulders, wrists or back, so the break does something.
Deskthaw checks three things on your Mac, locally: whether the camera or mic is live, whether a meeting app is in front, and whether an app is fullscreen. If any of them is true it waits. Otherwise it offers one short stretch, named for the part of you that's stiff, and gets out of the way.
There's no app window and no dashboard. You get a menu bar item, a dropdown, and a dot that tells you whether it's waiting or ready.
Tell it what to work on and stretches for those areas come first.
Your picks go in with your signup and decide which stretches get built first.
thaw next, thaw pause 1h, thaw status.macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon and Intel. It asks only for the permissions it needs to tell you're busy, and what it learns stays on the machine. It doesn't need your calendar. There's no telemetry you can't switch off, and what exists is listed in plain English.
At launch, install with Homebrew or download the app directly. The thaw command line follows right after.
$ brew install --cask deskthaw
I'm Anton, one developer with a wrecked neck, and I'm building this now. This page is a preorder, not a launch. The design you see is the real design and the list above is the real scope for version one, with the command line following right after. Preorders pay for the boring parts: Apple notarization, the exercise illustrations, and the months of testing the pause logic against real calls.
If it never ships, every preorder is refunded. If you change your mind, before launch or up to 30 days after, email hello@deskthaw.com and I'll refund you the same week. No questions.
$29
Preorder price. The first five hundred copies include lifetime updates. After that it's $39 with a year of updates, then $19 a year if you want more. The app keeps working either way. There's no account, no subscription, and the price never goes on sale: early buyers got the best deal and that stays true. At launch there's a 14-day trial with everything unlocked and no card, so nobody has to buy blind.
Expected early 2027. Refundable until the day it ships, and for 30 days after. Checkout runs on Stripe, so the receipt comes from Link and your statement reads LINK.COM* DESKTHAW.