A tiny menu-bar app that stops your Mac from sleeping — lid open, or lid closed where your Mac allows it — and switches itself off before it overheats or drains. It can’t leave your Mac unable to sleep, even if it crashes.
Cool and on AC power — safe to keep your Mac awake for a while.
Nominal AC 21°C
Features
One switch. Smart safety underneath.
Everything you need, nothing you don't.
Lid-closed stay-awake
One switch keeps your Mac running. Whether that survives the lid closing depends on the machine — always in clamshell mode (external display, on power), on Intel Macs, and on many Apple Silicon MacBooks too. Insomniac watches your first lid close and then tells you exactly what yours does, instead of guessing.
Checks your Mac, then says so
Stay Awake
58:30 left
⏱ Auto-off1 hour ▾
Thermal & battery safety
Stops on its own if your Mac gets too hot or the battery runs low — protecting your hardware.
Auto-off timer
Pick a duration and it switches off by itself, so you never forget.
Can’t strand your Mac awake
Every session is a short lease Insomniac has to keep renewing, and the part that holds your Mac awake carries a timeout macOS enforces itself. Quit it, force-quit it, let it crash, shut down mid-session — normal sleep comes back on its own, straight away in most of those cases and within two and a half minutes at the very worst. Nothing to remember, nothing left stuck.
New in 1.0.5
Session leaserenews every 30s
If Insomniac stopssleep back ≤ 2½ min
Left over from beforecleared at launch
Smart advice
Suggests a safe duration from current heat & power.
Use cases
Close the lid. Keep going.
For the long-running work you don’t want to babysit. One thing to keep in mind: a Mac working hard with the lid shut needs air. Leave it on a hard surface, not in a bag or under bedding — Insomniac watches the temperature and stops on its own, but it can’t create airflow.
Running an AI agent
A coding agent or local LLM keeps working while you close the lid and step away.
Won't pause
Building an app or APK
Long Xcode or Android builds finish after you shut the lid and step away from the desk.
Won't pause
Clamshell at your desk
External display, lid shut, charger in — the setup where lid-closed is guaranteed on every Mac, now with an auto-off so it can’t run all night.
Won't pause
Downloads & exports
Big transfers, renders, and video exports complete unattended, lid-closed.
Won't pause
Get started
Set up in two steps
Under a minute. No Terminal, no security warning.
1
Install
Open the downloaded insomniac.dmg and drag Insomniac onto the Applications folder. You can eject the disk image afterward.
2
Open it & find it
Open Insomniac from Applications — it just opens. It has no Dock icon; it lives in the menu bar at the top-right of your screen. Look for the moon (a welcome guide points right at it on first launch). Click it and flip Stay Awake on. For sessions that survive closing the lid, open Settings › Setup once and install the background helper — one password, one time. That helper is also what guarantees your Mac gets its normal sleep back afterwards.
Developer ID · Notarized
Every release is scanned by Apple before it ships.
Signed · notarized · no warnings
Checked by Apple before it reaches you.
Insomniac is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple — every release is uploaded to Apple, scanned for malicious code, and stamped with a ticket macOS verifies before the app runs.
That means no “can't be verified” dialog and no Terminal command. Earlier versions needed you to run an xattr command by hand to get past Gatekeeper; from 1.0.4 on, that's gone. If you ran it before, you never need to again.
Updates are signed too: Insomniac only installs an update whose cryptographic signature matches the key built into the app, so nobody can push you a modified build.
Changelog
What's new
Version 1.0.6 — latest release. If you are on 1.0.4 or earlier, please update.
1.0.6 — Two fixes on top of 1.0.5. With Settings expanded the menu could run past the bottom of the screen with no way to scroll, putting the Setup section — and the button that enables lid-closed sessions — out of reach; the panel now scrolls and stays within your display, and the lid notice carries its own Install helper button. And updating the app could quietly disable lid-closed sessions: macOS finds the background helper by an identity recorded at install time rather than by location, so replacing the app left that record pointing at nothing while still reporting the helper as enabled. Insomniac now verifies the helper answers at startup and repairs the registration itself. Nothing here put a Mac at risk — without the helper the system sleep setting is never touched — but closing the lid would have slept it when you expected otherwise.
1.0.5 — Important fix: Insomniac can no longer leave your Mac unable to sleep. In earlier versions the system sleep setting was switched off when a session started and back on when it ended — and if that second step failed or needed a password nobody was there to type, the setting stayed off. Persistently, across restarts. A Mac left with the lid closed could then run all night and flatten its battery, and the thermal and low-battery cutoffs couldn’t save it either, because they went through the same blocked step.
Sleep is now held on a short lease that Insomniac has to keep renewing, and the background helper — running as the system, not as the app — puts sleep back by itself the moment the lease lapses or Insomniac goes away. Quit it, force-quit it, let it crash, shut the Mac down mid-session: normal sleep returns with nothing to click — straight away when Insomniac exits, and within two and a half minutes at the very worst if it merely stops responding. If your Mac was already stuck in that state, Insomniac clears it at launch when the helper is installed, and otherwise offers you a one-click fix.
Also in this release: lid-closed sessions need the one-time background helper install (Settings › Setup) — the old password-prompt fallback is gone, because a prompt that appears at 3 a.m. is not a safety mechanism. Insomniac now watches what your Mac actually does when you close the lid and tells you, instead of guessing from the chip; starting a session while your Mac is already too hot is refused up front; and Use local weather is now off until you turn it on, so a fresh install makes no network requests at all.
1.0.4 — Notarized by Apple: no more “can't be verified” warning and no Terminal step — just drag and open. Automatic updates: Insomniac now updates itself, with every update cryptographically signed. Open at login is now a setting. Fixes: the welcome window no longer reappears on every launch, installing the silent-toggling helper takes effect immediately instead of after a restart, and lid-close and battery changes are no longer missed while the menu is open.
1.0.3 — Easier install: the disk image now opens as a guided window, with the one-time setup command shown there and a file to copy it from. Self-healing security: once you've opened the app once, the “unverified” warning never comes back.
1.0.2 — Custom auto-off length: pick any duration from 10 minutes to 8 hours with a slider, alongside the presets. Redesigned settings: a cleaner, grouped macOS System Settings–style layout with aligned rows.
1.0.1 — Bug fixes for low-battery behavior. The safety advisor now factors in battery level, so it no longer suggests a long session when the battery is low. Turning Stay Awake on when the battery is already at or below your auto-stop limit now shows a clear "plug in first" message instead of asking for your password twice in a row. Also new: an option to turn the screen off when you close the lid during a session.
1.0 — First public test build. Lid-closed stay-awake, the auto-off timer, automatic thermal & battery safety cutoffs, smart duration advice, and a first-launch welcome guide that points you to the menu-bar icon.
