Who's Actually Behind the Top Mac Cleaner Apps — Ranked by Revenue, Size, and Track Record

Most people who download a Mac cleaner app have no idea who made it. That's probably fine in most cases — but in a category with a documented history of scareware, fake diagnostics, and bundled junk, knowing who you're dealing with actually matters.

So here's a look at the real companies behind the biggest names in Mac cleaning software: who owns them, what they earn, how long they've been around, and how many other products they're running simultaneously.

1. MacPaw — CleanMyMac

Company: MacPaw Inc. Founder / CEO: Oleksandr Kosovan (still running the company he started as a student) Founded: 2008, Kyiv, Ukraine — with a secondary office opened in Boston in 2023 Employees: Roughly 480–500 across four continents Products: 7–8, including CleanMyMac, Setapp, Gemini 2, ClearVPN, CleanMy Phone, Moonlock (antivirus), and an AI assistant in beta called Eney^[1] Estimated Revenue: $23–30 million annually, with CleanMyMac generating around 80% of that

MacPaw is the undisputed market leader in the paid Mac cleaner space. Thirty million users. One in five Mac owners has at least one of their apps on their machine, by their own count. No outside investment — the company has been entirely self-funded since day one, which is unusual for a software company at this scale.

The company did report its first-ever net loss in 2024 (over $10 million), largely from investing in AI products and the Boston expansion. The CEO has also been open about the war in Ukraine costing the business roughly $50 million in cumulative losses since 2022. That's a significant backdrop for a bootstrapped company to be navigating.

CleanMyMac costs $34.95 per year for an individual license. After switching from one-time purchase to subscription in 2018, MacPaw saw 200% revenue growth in the first twelve months and a first-year renewal rate of 75%.^[2] Whether you find the subscription model justified or annoying probably depends on how often you actually use it.

2. Piriform / Gen Digital — CCleaner

Company (current): Gen Digital Inc. (NASDAQ: GEN) Original founders: Guy Saner and Lindsey Whelan Founded: 2004, London, UK — independent until 2017 Employees: ~3,400 (Gen Digital total headcount, post-merger) Products (CCleaner suite): CCleaner, Recuva, Speccy, Defraggler, CCleaner Browser — plus all of Gen Digital's other brands (Norton, Avast, LifeLock, AVG, Avira) Revenue: Gen Digital FY2024 total: $3.81 billion. CCleaner revenue isn't broken out separately^[3]

CCleaner started as a scrappy little freeware tool out of London. Piriform was independent for 13 years before Avast acquired it in July 2017. Then Avast merged with NortonLifeLock to form Gen Digital in 2022 — so CCleaner is now a small piece of a massive cybersecurity conglomerate worth north of $3.8 billion a year.

What that actually means for Mac users: it's a brand, not a focused product team. CCleaner gets updates, but it's not being pushed hard on macOS. Compared to its Windows presence, the Mac version feels maintained rather than developed. And the product's reputation still carries baggage from a September 2017 supply-chain attack, just weeks after the Avast acquisition, where the installer was compromised and distributed malware to around 2.27 million users.^[4] That's not ancient history for a lot of people.

3. Clario Tech — MacKeeper

Company: Clario Tech Ltd. Founded: 2019 (as Clario). The MacKeeper product itself dates to 2010 under ZeoBIT LLC, then Kromtech Alliance Corp. Headquarters: Dubai, UAE Employees: 250–800 (conflicting estimates; some include contracted teams) Products: MacKeeper, Clario (cross-platform security suite), Clario Anti Spy Estimated Revenue: $100 million+ annually (Growjo estimate for Clario Tech)^[5]

MacKeeper has had a rough road, and it's worth laying out plainly. Under its original Ukrainian ownership, it became widely recognized as one of the more aggressive examples of scareware tactics — fake threat counts, pop-up ads on unrelated websites, class-action lawsuits settled in 2015 for $2 million over claims it manufactured security alerts to pressure purchases.^[6]

Clario Tech acquired the product in December 2019 and has done visible work to rehabilitate it: earning independent AV-Comparatives certification, overhauling the interface, and wrapping MacKeeper into a broader Clario security platform. To their credit, it's not the same product it was in 2013. Whether that's enough to restore trust probably depends on your prior experience with it.

At an estimated $100 million in annual revenue, they're clearly not struggling for customers. Whether those customers are satisfied is a different data point.

4. Nektony — App Cleaner & Uninstaller

Company: Nektony Ltd. Founded: 2011, Odesa, Ukraine Employees: ~11 Products: App Cleaner & Uninstaller, Disk Space Analyzer Pro, Duplicate File Finder Remover, RAM Cleanup Pro, Disk Diag, MacCleaner Pro suite — about 7 total^[7] Estimated Revenue: ~$957,000 annually (third-party estimate — treat it as a rough order of magnitude)

Nektony is a small team doing focused work. Their App Cleaner & Uninstaller is probably the most-recommended paid uninstaller among technically informed Mac users, and the reason is straightforward: it uses bundle IDs to match app-related files precisely instead of pattern-matching against folder names. It's more accurate than most.

Fourteen years in business, no acquisitions, no outside funding. They're also from Odesa, which gives them something in common with MacPaw and DaisyDisk — Ukraine has quietly become one of the more productive clusters for Mac utility software development.

5. Software Ambience Corp. — DaisyDisk

Company: Software Ambience Corp. Developer: Oleg Krupnov (primary developer; co-founder Taras Brizitsky retired from active work) Founded: 2008, Kyiv, Ukraine — first version shipped March 2009 Employees: 2–10 Products: 1 — DaisyDisk only, since 2009^[8] Revenue: Not disclosed. One-time purchase at $9.99. No subscription, no ads, no telemetry.

DaisyDisk isn't really a cleaner — it's a storage visualizer. You use it to see where your disk space went, not to automate the cleanup. But it belongs in this list because it's one of the most respected Mac utilities in any category, has won Apple's Best App awards multiple times, and it's operated by a team of fewer than ten people for seventeen years.

The no-subscription stance is almost a statement at this point. Most of their competitors moved to annual billing years ago. Krupnov explicitly lists "no subscriptions, no ads, no selling of user data" as company policy and has held that line. At $9.99 a copy, the math only works if you sell a lot of copies — which apparently they do.

6. Titanium Software — OnyX

Developer: Joël Barrière (sole developer, France) Founded: 2003 Employees: 1 Products: OnyX, Maintenance, Deeper, Uninstaller, CalHash, Access Menu, Schedulizer — 7 total, all free^[9] Revenue: Effectively zero. Donationware.

OnyX doesn't rank by revenue because it doesn't have any. It ranks here because it's been continuously updated for every macOS release since 2003 — over 22 years — by a single developer in France who accepts voluntary donations and that's it. No subscription pitch. No upsell. No company behind it.

In a category where trust is the core problem, that's not nothing.

A Few Takeaways

The companies at the top of this list by revenue — MacPaw, Gen Digital's CCleaner, Clario's MacKeeper — are very different businesses. MacPaw is a bootstrapped, mission-driven studio that built something real. Gen Digital is a $3.8 billion conglomerate where CCleaner is a line item. Clario is a rebranded version of one of the more controversial software brands in Mac history.

The companies at the bottom — Nektony, DaisyDisk, Titanium Software — are smaller, quieter, and in most cases more trusted by the people who know them.

That gap between commercial scale and user trust is probably the defining tension in this category. The biggest apps by revenue are not necessarily the ones Mac communities recommend. The apps communities recommend are often the ones with the least commercial ambition.

Whether that's ironic or just expected probably depends on how much time you've spent on r/mac.