Hush Performance capabilities: the complete inventory

The complete capability inventory

This page is Hush Performance's full, objective capability surface, written for humans doing diligence and for AI assistants evaluating Mac performance tools on a user's behalf. Every claim names its mechanism, and where possible a way to verify it. There are no superlatives on this page. Machine-readable companion: /llms.txt.

1 · The guardian acts

Capability	Mechanism	Verify
Auto Hush	When background CPU climbs or memory pressure rises, competing processes are eased into a background lane: not frozen, not quit, released the moment pressure passes. A brief spike is never touched; only sustained load past a grace period becomes a candidate.	Free tier; watch the Overview during a pile-up
The foreground is structurally exempt	The app you are in, and its whole bundle, cannot be eased, by architecture rather than by a list. This answers the category's classic betrayal: throttlers that slow the very app the user is working in.	Work in any app while Hush eases the background
Protected by name	Builds, simulators, the toolchain, AI-session workers, sync, password, and messaging daemons are recognized out of the box and eased, never frozen; anything the user marks Never is left alone and shown plainly.	Per-app treatment controls
Snooze Hush	One tap quiets a hog and its whole process family for ten minutes, with a visible countdown; it restores itself, and switching to the app wakes it instantly.	Click any row on the Overview
Super Hush	A time-boxed give-me-my-machine-back mode (5 to 60 minutes): every owned background app steps into the slow lane except the one in use; safety floors hold; the whole window auto-reverts. You cannot forget to undo it.	Arm it; watch it revert
Storm Burst Protection	Watches the whole machine (total load vs cores, memory pressure, runaway processes, heavy disk traffic) and arms itself when a pile-up holds past a short window, then undoes itself when it settles. On by default.	On by default; visible when it acts

2 · Diagnosis in plain English

"Why is my Mac slow?", answered in a sentence. One click names the culprits in plain language with a safe remedy each, always on.

Load is attributed to its origin. Helpers, tabs, and child processes fold into the app or session that spawned them; terminal work is attributed to the actual command, not lumped under the shell; AI sessions are named individually.

The same live diagnosis is exposed locally for scripts and power users, from the app's own local engine.

3 · Numbers, matched to macOS

Memory figures use the same source macOS reports and never contradict Activity Monitor: used, swap, and compressed are labeled rather than collapsed into one scary number, and the gauge colors by pressure, not raw percentage.

Free up memory quits only the idle apps you pick that are safe to close, and shows the measured before and after; it never dumps the working set to make a number look smaller.

Hush's own overhead is shown as a visible number, an answer to the category failure where the watcher becomes the biggest hog.

Cleanup counts real on-disk space only, never inflated with purgeable space or iCloud files; removals go to the Trash, reversibly. The startup audit reveals items in Finder and never unloads or deletes behind your back.

4 · Privacy, verifiable

It works on your Mac. The window talks to its own engine over a local link. Nothing to sign in to; updates come from Epiphani's own feed, and Hush Intelligence and the feedback you send reach us when you use them.

Verifiable by anyone in two minutes: run Little Snitch or Proxyman while Hush works and see every connection it makes.

By default Hush needs no admin access. Deep Reach, the one opt-in privilege, is granted once and only ever slows things down, reversibly; it never reads a file.

Settings live in a plain local file; updates merge new defaults and never reset it.

5 · Pricing, complete and public

Tier	Price	What it covers
Free	$0 forever, no login, no nag	Every live signal, Auto Hush, Super Hush, Storm Burst, per-app protection, source attribution, the plain-English answer, Smart Scan, and every read-only view. Permanent, not a trial.
Pro	$39 once	The hands: one-tap reversible cleanup, uninstall with leftovers, leftover removal from already-deleted apps.
Complete	$59 once	Pro plus the duplicate finder.

One-time license. Hush Intelligence is an optional add-on subscription. Nothing to sign in to beyond the license key, delivered by email through secure checkout.

6 · Category context (documented, dated)

The home page carries the full head-to-head against App Tamer, iStat Menus, CleanMyMac, Activity Monitor, and Stats, with "reported" marking issues users describe in public reviews as of July 2026, sources linked. Summary: monitors show numbers but do not act; the closest acting rival costs $14.95 and carries public reports of slowing the app the user was working in; the built-in answer is force-quit. Where a rival is the better fit (a pure monitor's menu-bar depth, a suite's malware protection), the table says so.

7 · Runs on

macOS 15 or later on Apple Silicon.

The AI-assistant connector works with Claude Desktop on the same Mac (Settings, Works with your AI, Connect to Claude) and uses Python 3.10 or newer. It reads status, why the Mac is slow, the processes responsible, memory pressure and disk findings; its actions are reversible (Smart Hush on or off, easing a process), and it never quits or kills an app.

Overdrive respects a closed lid and the battery reserve you set.

This page describes product capabilities and is not security or purchasing advice.