Privacy

wattop runs entirely on your Mac. There is no telemetry, no analytics and no account. Nothing wattop reads leaves the machine; the only network request it ever makes is the pricing-table refresh described below.

What it reads

Agent transcripts. wattop reads Claude Code and Codex transcripts under ~/.claude and ~/.codex read-only and never writes to them. Specifically: ~/.claude/sessions, ~/.claude/projects and ~/.codex/sessions.

The whole process table. To find agent processes and bind sessions to them, the process scanner enumerates every process on the machine each cycle (sysctl(KERN_PROC_ALL)), not only the processes sessions end up bound to. For every process owned by your user it reads:

pid, command name and start time;
the full command line (argv, via KERN_PROCARGS2);
the current working directory;
resident memory, CPU time and disk read/write counters;
per-process GPU time.

Processes owned by other users are enumerated but skipped: macOS only lets an unprivileged process read that detail for its own user’s processes, and wattop never runs as root. The kernel call that returns a process’s arguments also returns its environment in the same buffer; wattop parses only the arguments and discards the rest. None of this is written to disk or sent anywhere.

Hardware. Apple Silicon power, temperature, fan and bandwidth sensors through IOReport and SMC, plus system memory, network and disk counters.

Configuration. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/wattop/config.toml (or ~/.config/wattop/config.toml) if you create one; wattop does not create it. See Config file.

--demo reads none of the above: it runs on synthetic data, ignores config.toml and makes no network request.

Network

The only network request is a pricing-table refresh: at most one GET per 24 hours to LiteLLM’s public price list on raw.githubusercontent.com. It is a plain download of a public file: it carries nothing about your machine or sessions beyond what any HTTP request carries (your IP address and Go’s default User-Agent).

The result is cached in $XDG_CACHE_HOME/wattop/pricing.json (default ~/.cache/wattop/pricing.json). If the request fails, the table embedded in the binary is used, so pricing works offline. See Pricing table.

What it writes

Only the pricing cache above. wattop does not write to ~/.claude, ~/.codex or config.toml, and keeps no logs or history on disk.

JSON output

--json includes the bound process (proc, with its argv and cwd) for each session, not the whole process table. See Usage.

This website

wattop.app uses Skopia for analytics: cookieless, and it collects no personal data. This applies to the website only. The wattop binary has no analytics or telemetry of any kind.