I recently had to go on a trip where my wifi was super limited. We were allocated 2gb of data a week over wifi. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever really paid attention to your data usage on your laptop/desktop, but you’ll eat through that FAST. It feels like everything on your laptop is calling home, trying to update, etc. I was trying to find a way to really limit my data usage. I did some googlefu and stubbled across an app for macOS called TripMode.

TripMode allows you to limit network access to only the apps/processes that you want. I limited mine to pretty much only the services I needed. If I needed something I turned it on and then immediately turned it off. It worked wonderfully. It will even alert you when an unauthorized app has tried to connect to something. TripMode recognized that the network I was on the one that needed to be metered, and auto turned itself on.

While you have the app turned on you can tell how much data I have used for the session, day, week, or month. When the app is metering data, you can have it alert you after you’ve used a certain amount. I had an alert set up when I passed 1gb, so I knew to be extra careful.

TripMode was well worth the money if you are ever in a situation where you need to really limit your data usage. It would be great when using a wifi hotspot, travel where data is limited, or if you just are really a stickler about your data usage. It was well worth my $7.99.