Crest 5, drawn live in your browser. Click a tile to zoom in, or a mode to re-sort.
MacBook notch · macOS 14+ · Pay once
Crest turns the notch into a live panel for the things you check all day: what's playing, what's next, what your Mac is doing, and the agent that is waiting on you. It never takes focus. Nothing you do is sent to us.
Free tier forever, no account. Sign in for seven days of Pro, no card. Tax included. Signed and notarized by Apple. No notch? It sits in a small pill at the top of the screen.
Why pay for a notch app
The notch is the one place on a Mac your eyes land without being asked. Crest puts the things you check twenty times a day there, and gets out of the way the rest of the time.
Join the standup, answer Claude Code, tick a todo, grab what you copied an hour ago. All from the top of the screen, over fullscreen apps, on whichever display you are looking at.
The panel never takes focus. Type into it while your editor keeps the caret. It passes clicks through to the menu bar and hides under fullscreen apps until you look up.
One payment covers two Macs and every update for the life of the app. There is nothing to cancel because nothing renews.
No analytics, no tracking, no cloud copy of your day. Licensing stores your email and a machine id. Weather and lyrics come straight from their source, and the co-pilot uses your own Claude subscription.
A day in the notch
Scroll. The panel does what you would do, at the moment you would do it.
The meeting unfolds in the notch itself, with Join right there. One click and you are in. No Calendar window, no digging for the link in the invite.
The ask lands on the notch and waits until you answer, over fullscreen apps and on any display. Allow or Deny, one click, and the agent carries on.
The song, a live scrubber and the transport sit on one tile. Click the tile for synced lyrics, the queue and the output. Music, Spotify, anything macOS reports.
Click the Shelf tile and it grows into the module right where it sat: the files you parked, and your clipboard history, one click from copied again.
Hover the notch and it widens into one line: the agent, your pull requests, the CPU, the shelf. No click, no panel. Click when you want the rest.
For people who run agents
An agent waiting on a permission is an agent doing nothing. Crest pins the question in the notch, over everything, on any display, until you answer.
npm run deploy in siteWatch
Two more, same maker, same deal
Bought once, run on your Mac, nothing uploaded. Crest drives both from the notch.
Screen recordings that land already edited: zooms where you clicked, a smoothed cursor, a real backdrop, and a timeline where what you see is exactly what exports. On a call, the same staged screen is your camera in Meet, Zoom and FaceTime. No watermark, ever.
Records any call on your Mac, both sides, with no bot joining. The transcript, the summary and the action items are written on this Mac, every promise gets an Add button, and nothing is uploaded.
$59.98 bought separately. The bundle is $35, and it is still one licence per app, two Macs each, updates for life.
Written by people who use the apps, published once we have read them. A verified badge means the address holds a licence. We do not write these.
1 review
I like the aesthetic, I mainly use for media control and AI development. Claude works great in it!
Compare
Every claim below comes from the other apps' own sites. Where they win, it says so.
| . | Crest | The Boring Notch | NotchNook | Alcove |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $19.99 once | Free, open source | $25 once, or $3 a month | $14.99 once |
| Try it | Free tier forever, plus 7 days of Pro | Everything is free | Trial only | 72-hour trial |
| Agent approvals | Claude Code and Codex, in the notch | No | No | No |
| Claude co-pilot | Files reminders, todos and events, on your approval | No | No | No |
| Meetings and todos | Calendar with one-click Join, todos, notes, Pomodoro | Calendar | Widgets and a tray | Notifications and Live Activities |
| Developer tools | GitHub PRs and CI, SSH hosts, live agent sessions | None | None | None |
| Opens like a Mac app | Signed and notarized | Needs a Gatekeeper bypass | Signed | Signed |
| On battery | Animations pause, sleeps with the Mac | Low CPU on Apple Silicon | User reports of high CPU at times | Not stated |
| Macs per licence | Two | Unlimited | Standalone or via Setapp | Three |
Pricing
Every module: agents, co-pilot, calendar, todos, hosts, battery, system, modes. Two Macs, updates for life. The free tier stays free.
Get Crest ProDownload free, 7-day Pro trial
Auto staging, live editing, and a staged camera for calls. MP4, ProRes and GIF, no watermark. Any Mac on macOS 14 and up.
Get TakeTry free for 7 days, no card
Records any call, both sides, no bot. Transcript, summary and action items written on this Mac. Apple Silicon, macOS 26.
Get MinutesTry free for 7 days, no card
Crest Pro, Take and Minutes. One payment, three licences, two Macs each. Crest drives the other two from the notch.
Get the bundleCard, PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay through Paddle, or crypto.7-day refund, no reason needed.Prices in USD, tax included.The licence lives on your account. No keys to paste.
Questions
No. Every app is a one-time purchase with free updates. The bundle is one payment of $35 for all three. There is nothing to cancel because nothing renews.
An account on the email you paid with, and a link in your inbox to set a password. Sign in inside the app and it unlocks. There are no licence keys to paste, and the licence covers two Macs.
All of it. Crest has a free tier plus seven days of Pro, and Take and Minutes each start with a seven-day trial. No card up front for any of them. Downloading needs no account: you sign in inside the app when you start a trial, because the account is how you get what you buy later.
Yes. You need internet once, to activate. After that every feature runs offline. Minutes never sends audio or text anywhere, online or not: transcription and summaries run on the models inside macOS.
Crest runs on any Mac on macOS 14 or later. On a MacBook with a notch it lives in the notch; on any other screen it sits in a small pill at the top and opens the same panel. Take runs on any Mac on macOS 14 or later. Minutes needs macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon, because its transcription and summaries run on device.
Seven days, full refund, no reason required. Write to [email protected] from the email you paid with. More questions on the support page.
Crest for macOS
macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Signed and notarized by Apple · Free tier forever, no account · Seven days of Pro when you sign in.
Stars and a few honest words. It goes live once we have read it. If your email matches a licence it gets a verified badge.
Thank you. It is in the queue and goes up once it has been read.