Install & first launch

Pulsaria is a normal Mac app: download a DMG, drag it to Applications, open it. The first launch starts your 30-day trial and walks you through a short wizard and a guided tour of the interface. This page covers all of it, step by step.

System requirements

Requirement	Detail
Operating system	macOS 12 Monterey or later
Processor	Apple Silicon or Intel — one universal build covers both
Internet	Only needed to download the app, activate a licence, and for KPIs that fetch from the web
Account	None. Pulsaria has no sign-up and no cloud service

There is no iOS, iPad, Windows or Linux build to download. Pulsaria is a Mac app.

Download and install

1. Open https://www.pulsaria-kpi.com/en/download and press Download for macOS. You get a file called Pulsaria.dmg.
2. Double-click Pulsaria.dmg. A window opens showing the Pulsaria icon and a shortcut to your Applications folder.
3. Drag Pulsaria onto the Applications folder.
4. Eject the DMG and open Pulsaria from your Applications folder.

Installing into /Applications matters more than it looks: Pulsaria updates itself in place later, and an app that lives in your Downloads folder is a worse neighbour for that.

The first open (Gatekeeper)

The build is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate, notarized by Apple, and the notarization ticket is stapled onto the DMG. In practice that means two things:

• macOS asks once for confirmation because the app was downloaded from the internet. Confirm with Open and you will not be asked again.
• The check works offline, because the ticket travels inside the DMG instead of being fetched from Apple.

If macOS instead claims the app is damaged or comes from an unidentified developer, the download did not finish cleanly. Delete the DMG, download it again, and open the fresh copy.

What happens on first launch

Pulsaria opens on the Dashboard, and three things happen at once: your trial clock starts, the welcome wizard opens on top of the dashboard, and — a moment after you close the wizard — the guided tour begins.

Your 30-day trial starts

There is nothing to activate. On the first launch Pulsaria stamps a start date and gives you 30 days with the complete feature set: every connector, every automation, unlimited KPIs, export and import. No credit card, no email address, no account.

The start date is written in two places — into Pulsaria’s config file inside the app-data folder, and into a small text file at ~/.pulsaria-trial. The earlier of the two counts, so deleting one of them does not restart the clock.

You will not see a trial banner on day 1. The Dashboard stays quiet until 10 or fewer days remain; the exact number of days left is always visible under App Settings → License, shown as Trial — N days left. When the 30 days are up, nothing is deleted — the app switches to read-only until you activate a licence. Details on Trial & licence.

No account, no sign-in, no telemetry by default. Pulsaria does contact the internet once shortly after start to check for a newer version, and crash reporting is off until you switch it on. See Privacy: what leaves your Mac.

The welcome wizard

The wizard opens by itself on the first launch, as a dialog over the dimmed dashboard. It has exactly three steps. A row of three dots at the bottom shows where you are (the active one is a wider bar), Back sits on the left and is disabled on step 1, Next on the right.

Step 1 — Welcome to Pulsaria

Text only, no inputs. Three paragraphs explain what Pulsaria tracks, the difference between manual KPIs (you type the number) and auto KPIs (a shell command, an HTTP endpoint or a connector fetches it on a schedule), and the idea the whole product rests on: the ideal line. If you want 120 sales this month and it is day 10, the ideal for today is 40 — green means you are ahead of that line, red means behind. More on that in Ideal line & status.

Press Next.

Step 2 — Choose your language

One dropdown labelled Language with three options:

Option	Effect
System	Follows your macOS language: anything German becomes German, anything English becomes English, everything else falls back to English
Deutsch	German interface
English	English interface

There is no confirm button. The choice applies the moment you pick it and is saved right away, so step 3 already appears in the language you just chose. The same setting lives later under App Settings → Language. Only German and English exist.

Step 3 — Your first KPI

A five-field form. Name spans the full width; Target and Unit share the next row; Direction and Period share the last.

Field	Required	Notes
Name	Yes	Free text, placeholder e.g. Revenue Growth. Empty shows “Name is required”
Target	Yes	A number greater than 0. Empty shows “Target is required”, 0 or a negative value shows “Target must be a number greater than 0”
Unit	No	Free text, placeholder %. Leave it empty for a plain count
Direction	—	Higher is better (default) or Lower is better
Period	—	Year (default), Quarter or Month

Error messages only appear after you have left a field. The green Create KPI button stays disabled until name and target are valid; hovering it while it is disabled shows “Please fill in all required fields”.

Press Create KPI and you get the toast “KPI created” with the line “Your first KPI is ready — top it up every day under Daily Entry.” The wizard closes.

The KPI the wizard creates is always company-wide, always manual, and always of the type Cumulative goal — the kind where values add up towards the target. The footnote under the form says as much: “Company-wide and manual for now. You can add projects, automation, and custom periods later in Settings.” The wizard cannot pick a project, choose a connector or a script as the source, or set a custom date range. All of that is available afterwards in the normal KPI dialog — see Your first KPI and Anatomy of a KPI.

Or start from a ready-made pack

Under the form, next to the line “Or start from a ready-made pack:”, sits Use a template. It opens a picker titled Start from a template with three packs:

Pack	KPIs
SaaS Founder	6 — MRR, churn rate, trial-to-paid conversion, active users, new signups, support response time
Freelancer	5 — monthly revenue, billable hours, active projects, average invoice age, new leads
E-Commerce	6 — revenue, orders, conversion rate, average order value, cart abandonment, return rate

Press Use pack on one of them and all of its KPIs are created at once, with sensible default targets you edit afterwards. Every pack KPI is manual, company-wide and uses the Month period. No demo data is added — the KPIs start empty.

Applying a pack closes the wizard immediately and ends onboarding. Anything you typed into the step-3 form is discarded, and no single KPI is created from it. Decide between the form and a pack before you press.

Leaving the wizard early

There is no Skip button. You leave the wizard with the X in the top-right corner, with Escape, or by clicking the dimmed background. All three count as “done”: the wizard never opens by itself again, even if you created nothing. A language you picked on step 2 stays saved.

The guided tour

Half a second after the wizard closes, the tour starts. Everything except one element is dimmed, the element gets a cyan outline, and a small card next to it shows a step counter like 1 / 5, a Skip link, a title, one sentence and Back / Next (Done on the last step).

The five steps, in order:

1. Your navigation — the sidebar as a whole.
2. Add a KPI — the + KPI button on the Company-wide group of the dashboard.
3. Enter your numbers — the Daily Entry item in the sidebar.
4. Group with projects — the Projects item.
5. Make it yours — the App Settings item.

The tour points at where things are; it does not open any dialog or walk you through a real task. It always runs on the dashboard and navigates you there when it starts.

Things worth knowing:

• On a dashboard with no KPIs and no projects, the + KPI button does not exist yet — the dashboard shows its empty state instead. That step is dropped up front and the counter reads 1 / 4.
• Skip, Escape and Done all end the tour and mark it as seen. Clicking the dimmed area does nothing.
• You cannot resume a half-finished tour. Restarting always begins at step 1.
• While the tour runs, clicks on the interface underneath are swallowed. Scrolling still works and the spotlight follows.

If you closed the wizard so fast that the tour had nothing to attach to, or you dismissed the tour and want it back, see the next section.

Running the wizard or the tour again

Both live in App Settings, the last item in the sidebar — but in two different cards, and both buttons carry the same label, Restart tour. This is genuinely confusing, so take the card title as the guide:

Card	Button	What it does
Welcome Tour	Restart tour	Re-opens the three-step setup wizard
Product tour	Restart tour	Re-runs the spotlight tour and navigates you to the dashboard

Two caveats on the wizard replay, both real behaviour of the current version:

• The hint under Welcome Tour says the introduction is shown the next time you open the dashboard. It is not — the wizard opens immediately.
• Within the same app session the wizard resumes on the step you last left, with your old input still in the fields, and the Language dropdown always displays System regardless of what is actually set. A fresh app start begins at step 1 again. Pressing Create KPI a second time creates an additional KPI; it never edits the first one.

If you skipped everything

A dashboard with no KPIs and no projects shows a welcome panel with three buttons:

• Create project — opens the New Project dialog. See Projects.
• Create KPI — opens the full KPI dialog, where you also choose the data source. See Data sources at a glance.
• Use a template — the same three starter packs as in the wizard.

As soon as one KPI or one project exists, the dashboard switches to its normal group layout. That is described in Dashboard.

Updates

About five seconds after start, Pulsaria quietly asks its update server whether a newer version exists. If one does, you get a toast “Update available” with a View action that takes you to App Settings → Updates, where you see the release notes and can run Download & install. If no update exists, or the check fails, nothing is shown. Updates are signature-verified before they are installed. There is no way to switch the start-up check off, and no auto-install — see Settings.

Where to go next

• Your first KPI — the full create flow, with every option the wizard leaves out.
• Entering values — the daily routine.
• Trial & licence — what read-only mode blocks, and how to activate a key.
• Where your data lives — the exact folders on disk.