What Pulsaria is

Pulsaria is a Mac app for the handful of numbers that decide whether your month went well. You give each number a target and a period, and Pulsaria tells you every day whether you are on pace. Everything lives in plain files on your own Mac.

The one question

Most tools show you what happened. Pulsaria answers something narrower: am I on pace?

You define a KPI with a target and a period — say 50000 EUR for this year. Pulsaria spreads that target evenly across every day of the period and calls the result the ideal line. Today’s point on that line is your ideal today: the value you would have if progress had been perfectly even since day one. Your latest recorded value minus that number is the gap, and it is printed as a percentage next to every KPI — +18% vs ideal or −12% vs ideal.

From the same comparison comes a traffic light on every card:

Status	When
On track (green)	Your value is at or above the ideal for today
At risk (amber)	You are behind, but by less than 10 % of the ideal
Off track (red)	You are behind by 10 % or more

For a KPI where lower is better — error rate, churn, hours spent — the bands mirror: at or below the ideal is on track, up to 10 % above it is at risk.

Two kinds of KPI

Not every number accumulates, so each KPI is one of two types:

• Cumulative goal — the value adds up toward the target over the period. Revenue, sales, signups. The ideal line grows from 0 on the first day to the target at the end.
• Recurring value — each measurement is a fresh reading judged against a benchmark. Monthly active users, NPS, conversion rate. The ideal line sits flat at the target, and the question becomes “is this reading at target?” rather than “have I accumulated enough?”.

You choose the type when you create the KPI, under KPI type. It changes the maths, the dashed reference line in the charts and the wording of the badges.

The ideal line is a straight line, always. Pulsaria does not model seasonality, weekday weighting or a slow ramp-up, and it does not forecast whether you will hit the target. It reports where you stand today against even progress — nothing more.

The exact formula, the edge cases on the first and last day of a period, and how historical values are graded are on Ideal line & status.

Who it is for

Pulsaria is built for one person or a small team looking at ten to twenty numbers, not for an analytics department looking at two thousand. It fits if:

• you run a product, a freelance practice or a small company and check your numbers yourself
• you can paste an API key and, if you like, write a one-line shell command
• you want a daily answer, not a query language

It does not fit if you need to share dashboards with clients, slice data by arbitrary dimensions, or work from a phone.

Where the numbers come from

Every KPI has exactly one data source, picked as the first step when you create it:

Source	What it is
Manual	Type values in yourself — for numbers that can’t (or shouldn’t) be scripted.
Connector	Google, Stripe, Polar.sh, Awin, Plausible — ready-made metrics, no approval needed.
Bash	Any shell command that prints a number. Runs on your Mac, needs your approval.
HTTP	Any HTTP endpoint with a number in the JSON response. Needs your approval.

Six connectors ship today: Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, Plausible, Polar.sh, Stripe and Awin. Each one carries its own setup guide and a list of metrics with sensible defaults for unit, direction, period and schedule. If your service is missing, the library has a Request a connector button that opens a pre-filled email.

Automated KPIs — Connector, Bash and HTTP — can carry a Cron schedule so they fetch themselves in the background. Bash and HTTP KPIs additionally require your explicit approval of the exact command or URL before they will ever run unattended; change the command and the approval is void until you grant it again.

Details per source: Data sources at a glance, Connectors, Custom HTTP sources, Shell commands.

What stays on your Mac

Pulsaria has no backend. Your projects, KPI definitions, every recorded value, the alerts and the fetch log are JSON files in a folder you can open in Finder, back up with Time Machine or read with any text editor. By default that folder is:

~/Library/Application Support/com.onepixelahead.pulsaria/pulsaria

You can point it somewhere else — an iCloud Drive folder, for instance, which is how the same data reaches a second Mac. Connector credentials are the exception: API keys and service-account files go into the macOS Keychain, never into the data folder and never into an export.

Four things do leave your Mac, and only these:

• Requests you configured yourself. A connector or HTTP KPI calls the API you pointed it at, with the credentials you supplied.
• Licence checks. Activating and periodically re-verifying your licence key contacts the licence server.
• Update checks. The app asks whether a newer version exists.
• Crash reports — only if you switch them on. Off by default. Stack traces and anonymised metadata only, never your KPI names, values or file paths.

Buttons that open a checkout page, a service’s website or a pre-filled email hand off to your browser or mail app. Pulsaria sends nothing on its own with them — the email in particular is only opened, never sent.

More on both: Where your data lives and Privacy: what leaves your Mac.

The six screens

Screen	What it’s for
Dashboard	Every KPI as a card, grouped company-wide and per project, with status pills and alerts. The home screen.
Projects	Projects as cards with their own roll-up of on track / at risk / off track.
Daily Entry	The form for typing in today’s numbers, one row per manual KPI, with a read-only section for the automated ones.
Reports	A print-ready Weekly Review: one row per KPI with target, current value, 7-day change and status. Print or save as PDF.
Fetch Log	The last 500 automated fetches, with values, errors, output and timings. Where you look when an auto KPI misbehaves.
App Settings	Language, theme, data folder, reminders, licence, connections, export and import.

Two more screens are reached by clicking through rather than from the navigation: a KPI’s detail page (chart, history table, edit and delete) and a project’s detail page.

Trial and licence

Pulsaria runs for 30 days with every feature unlocked and no credit card. After that it switches to read-only until you activate a licence — a one-time purchase, no subscription.

Read-only means read-only, not locked out. Your files are untouched, every screen still works, and export and print keep working. What stops is writing: new values, edits, imports and automatic fetching.

See Trial & licence.

What Pulsaria deliberately is not

Knowing the boundaries saves you an evening of looking for a feature that isn’t there.

• Not a BI platform. There is no query builder, no pivot, no custom dashboard layout, no drill-down and no chart that puts two KPIs side by side. Each KPI gets its own chart: your values plus the ideal line, over 7, 30 or 90 days.
• Not a team tool. No user accounts, no shared workspaces, no permissions, no comments and no per-KPI ownership. If a colleague needs the numbers, print the Weekly Review or send them a CSV export.
• Not a cloud service. You never create a Pulsaria account, and there is no server that holds your data. Syncing between your own Macs happens at file level, by pointing the data folder at iCloud Drive — with the everyday caveats of file sync.
• Not a mobile app. Pulsaria is a Mac app: Universal build, macOS 12 Monterey or later. There is no iPhone or iPad version you can buy today.
• Not a forecast. Nothing extrapolates your current run rate to the end of the period. Pulsaria states where you are relative to even progress and leaves the projection to you.
• Not an importer for historical data. There is no CSV import for past values; entries arrive by hand, by fetch, or through a JSON export from another Pulsaria installation.

Where to go next

1. Install & first launch — download, first open, the welcome tour and the settings worth touching straight away.
2. Your first KPI — from the empty dashboard to a KPI showing a status, in a few minutes.
3. Ideal line & status — the exact maths behind “ideal today”, the gap percentage and the three colours.