Your MacBook already has a black rectangle at the top of the screen doing nothing. Crest hangs a real control panel from it: what is playing, what is next, what your Mac is doing, and an AI that can act on all of it. It never takes focus and never steals a click from your menu bar.
Free tier forever, plus 7 days of Pro on the house · macOS 14 Sonoma or later · signed and notarized
A menu bar item makes you click. A window makes you switch. The notch is the one place on a Mac your eyes land without being asked, which is why it is the right home for the three things you check twenty times a day.
60 seconds: the control room, drawn from the real interface.
Real screenshot. Crest 4.11 on macOS, untouched.
An agent that needs permission stops being useful the moment you stop noticing it asked. Crest puts the question in the notch, pinned, over fullscreen apps, on whichever display you are looking at, and keeps it there until you answer.
Claude Code and Codex ask through a sanctioned hook. You answer at the top of the screen and the agent carries on. No window switch, no lost context.
The prompt sticks until it is answered rather than vanishing after a few seconds, because a missed approval is an agent sitting still.
Ask or dictate, get an answer, and let it create the reminder, todo or event it suggested, after you approve. Uses your Claude subscription, no API key.
The whole catalog, drawn live on this page. Hover any tile.
Free forever: Now Playing, Shelf and Clipboard. Pro unlocks the rest of the wall for one payment. Turn on what you want, hide the rest.
There are good notch apps. What none of them do is answer your coding agent, keep your servers a tap away, and drive two other apps from the same panel.
| Crest | Boring Notch | NotchNook | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code and Codex approvals in the notch | Yes | No | No |
| An AI co-pilot that can create events and todos | Yes | No | No |
| Saved SSH hosts that open in your terminal | Yes | No | No |
| Drives a screen recorder and a meeting notetaker | Yes | No | No |
| Now Playing with synced lyrics | Yes | Playback, no lyrics | Playback, no lyrics |
| Free tier that keeps working | Yes | Open source | Paid |
| One-time purchase | Yes | Free | Yes |
Published by the makers of Crest, from each app's own public documentation as of July 2026. Competitor names are the property of their owners. The longer Boring Notch comparison · Crest vs NotchNook
The free tier is not a countdown. Pro adds every module above and stays yours.
Now Playing, the shelf and your clipboard history. No expiry, no nag screen.
Plus 7 days of Pro when you first launch it.
Download freeNo card, no account cost.
Every module, on 2 Macs, forever. Free updates for the life of the app.
Nothing renews and nothing expires.
Crest Pro plus Take and Minutes, the two apps this panel drives.
$25 less than buying them separately.
Pay by card or crypto. Everything you own lives at your account. What changed in the last release
For the real experience, yes: the panel hangs from the notch and that is the whole idea. On a Mac without one it still runs, pinned to the top of the display, but it was designed for the notch.
No. Other notch apps have a reputation for always-on animation. Crest pauses its animations on battery and in Low Power Mode, and sleeps its monitors when your Mac sleeps.
Every module runs locally and there is no analytics. The only network calls are the licence check, the update check, and whatever you ask the Claude co-pilot yourself.
Crest checks by itself and can install in place, and Settings has a Check for updates button. Every update is free for the life of the app.
The free tier keeps working, forever, with nothing deleted. Anything you made in a Pro module is still there and comes straight back if you buy.