Recipe

See which app uses data on a hotspot

Q: Can I do this without Kilobat?

Yes. Activity Monitor and nettop show network use by process. See Find which app uses your bandwidth on a Mac.

Kilobat shows the upload and download of each app on your Mac. Use it on a hotspot to find the app that uses your data.

Live traffic: freeHistory by app: Kilobat Pro in the appChecked: 29 October 2026

In the app

Click the Kilobat item in the menu bar. The Overview tab opens.
Read Download and Upload at the top. They show the current rate for the whole Mac.
Look at the app list below. It sorts the apps by the data they used in this session.
Click an app's row. Its panel shows a sentence about what it moved and its last five minutes.
With Pro, choose hour, day, week or month in the panel to see the history of that app.
Expand the System downloads row to see services such as nsurlsessiond and softwareupdated. With the network filter on, a row can say which app a download was for.

With the CLI

Install the CLI. It is free and open source.
```
brew install seifip/kilobat/kilobat
```
Show live traffic by app. Press s to sort, f to filter, / to search and q to quit.
```
kilobat status --watch
```
Get one snapshot as JSON for a script.
```
kilobat status --json
```
Output Each app has id, name, its rates, sessionBytes, internetBytes, localBytes and tunnelBytes.
Show the totals and the top apps for today. Use --days 7 to compare with a normal week.
```
kilobat report --summary --days 1
```
Output Internet download and upload totals, then up to 10 apps by bytes.
Show one app over one day, with its peak.
```
kilobat bandwidth "Google Chrome" day
```

Through MCP

Connect the MCP server once with claude mcp add kilobat -- kilobat mcp. For other clients, see the docs. Then an agent can call these tools. Tools that change settings tell the agent to ask you first.

Tool and arguments	What it does
`get_status`	Per-app traffic now, whether the network is metered, and the active profile.
`get_usage_report` `{"days": 1}`	Totals per day and the top 10 apps.
`get_app_bandwidth` `{"app": "Google Chrome", "range": "day"}`	One app's sent and received bytes in buckets, with the peak.

Good to know

Only Internet traffic uses your plan. Kilobat shows local network and AirDrop traffic apart and does not count it.
Kilobat records history only while the app runs. A gap does not prove that nothing used data.
Uploads count too. A photo library sync can use more data than web pages.

Questions

Does Kilobat see the data that my phone uses?

No. Kilobat sees only the traffic of this Mac. The phone and other devices on the hotspot are not in its figures.

Can I do this without Kilobat?

Yes. Activity Monitor and nettop show network use by process. See Find which app uses your bandwidth on a Mac.

Sources

Sources checked on 29 October 2026. Man pages are the ones installed with macOS; open one with man <name> in Terminal.