Cooked vs Battery Toolkit
Battery Toolkit is free and open source, and it holds a charge limit well. It’s also archived: its author put the repository in read-only mode on March 21, 2026. That’s the fact worth knowing before you hand it your charge controller, and it isn’t a knock on the work.
Cooked
Notarized app with a background service
- 20–100%
- Limit range
- Yes
- Still maintained
- Free, €24.99/yr or €49 once
- Price
Battery Toolkit
Open source app with a privileged daemon
- 50–100%
- Limit range
- Archived
- Still maintained
- Free, BSD licence
- Price
Feature by feature
| Feature | Cooked | Battery Toolkit |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest limit you can set | 20% | 50% |
| Still maintained | included | no |
| Signed and notarized by Apple | included | no |
| Discharges down to your target | included | included |
| Keeps that setting across a reboot | included | no |
| Your Mac still sleeps while charging | included | no |
| Menu bar icon shows what it’s doing | included | included |
| Live health and temperature | included | no |
| Battery history, from today back to months ago | paid | no |
| Pauses charging when hot | paid | no |
| Open source | no | included |
| Free with no licence at all | no | included |
| Price | Free, €24.99/yr or €49 once | Free, BSD licence |
- included
- no
The Battery Toolkit column comes from its own README, read on August 5, 2026, at release 1.8. “Paid” marks what needs a Cooked licence. Both apps run on Apple Silicon only.
Checked on August 5, 2026 against the project’s own README and repository status. If the project comes back, this page gets rewritten the same day.
Where they actually differ
Archived means nothing is coming
The repository has been read-only since March 21, 2026. The app still works, and BSD-licensed code doesn’t evaporate. But charge control talks to the system power controller, and macOS changes that surface without asking anyone. An archived app has nobody on the other end when it does.
It stops at 50%, and it keeps your Mac awake
Their own README says both: the upper limit can’t go below 50% for safety, and sleep is disabled while charging, because the app has to be awake to stop the charge itself. Cooked holds anywhere from 20% and doesn’t take a sleep assertion, so your Mac sleeps the way it always did.
It isn’t notarized, and they say why
No Apple Developer Program membership, so macOS blocks the first launch and you have to go through Privacy & Security to allow it. That’s an honest trade they document openly. Cooked is signed and notarized, which is also why it can’t live on the Mac App Store: the background service needs a right the store doesn’t grant.
So which one?
Choose Cooked if
- You want something still being worked on, against a system that keeps changing.
- You want to hold below 50%, or you want your Mac to sleep normally while it charges.
- You’d rather not walk through Gatekeeper warnings to install a battery tool.
Choose Battery Toolkit if
- You want source code you can read, audit and build yourself.
- You want it free forever, with no licence and no account anywhere.
- 50% is low enough for you, and the first-launch steps don’t bother you.
Where these facts come from
Every box above comes from a public page we read ourselves, not from memory. Here’s the trail, so you can disagree with us.
Compare Cooked with something else
Set your limit once. That’s the whole job.
Free forever, no account, no tracking. Apple Silicon (M1 or newer), macOS 13 Ventura or newer.