Running a sustainable software business means being upfront about why a tool costs money. Proximos is priced deliberately, and here’s the reasoning behind it:1. A highly professional, capable, full-featured, complete solution. Proximos isn’t a single script or a weekend project — it’s a polished application with a menu bar presence, a full settings interface, licensing and billing systems, API cloud infrastructure, MDM deployment tooling, and ongoing engineering investment to keep pace with new macOS releases. Building and maintaining that level of completeness takes real, continuous work.2. AWS cloud costs for ongoing macOS version data and app connectivity. Every Mac running Proximos checks in with the Proximos Engine to get the latest required macOS version and enforcement timing. That requires a live, monitored backend — AWS Lambda functions polling Apple’s GDMF feed every five minutes, a database, an authenticated API with failover endpoints, and the infrastructure to keep all of it online and responsive at scale. None of that runs for free.3. Operational liability is high for software priced at just 50 cents a device. Proximos sits in a position of real responsibility — it’s the thing telling a Mac when to update, and that carries genuine operational and legal exposure if something goes wrong. At a price point as low as 50 cents per device per month, even a small amount of liability risk needs to be priced in just to keep the business viable. Charging something, even modestly, lets us stand behind the product responsibly.
Are You Familiar with Other Similar but Free macOS Projects?
Yes — we’re familiar with and have a lot of respect for the broader Mac Admins community’s open-source work. Nudge and SOFA are wonderful projects that represent the highest standard of open source professionalism. We’re also grateful for IBM Notifier and its presence in this space. We’re familiar with the innovative S.U.P.E.R.M.A.N. project as well, and we appreciate its strong efforts toward using Apple’s built-in tools effectively.Even with all of these excellent tools available, we still found gaps that none of them fully addressed on their own — which is exactly the space Proximos was designed to fulfill.
