For video calls
“You froze” again, and the speed test says 500 Mbps. Kilobat checks the line before your meeting, holds Dropbox and Steam while you talk, and when the call ends tells you how many times it froze and what caused it.
brew install seifip/kilobat/kilobat
Once a second during a call, Kilobat pings the internet and your router and notes which apps are busy and how hard the Mac is working. A few kilobytes a minute, and nothing about the call itself.
Another app on your Mac uploading or downloading: Dropbox, iCloud, a backup, a game launcher.
The card names the app and whether it was uploading. Pro
Another device on your network: a TV streaming in 4K, a console downloading, a backup on another computer.
When your router shares its traffic counters (UPnP), Kilobat sees the line busy with traffic your Mac didn’t send. It only reads them. Pro
AirDrop scanning: the Mac’s radio hops channels to look for nearby devices.
Named on the card, and Call mode can pause AirDrop for the call. Pro
The Wi-Fi: weak signal, a busy channel, or the router itself stalling.
Kilobat sees the router stall too, so the freeze is in the room, not out on the internet. Pro
Beyond your router: your provider or the call’s own servers.
Router fine, nothing else busy, internet slow: it says so, and the provider report proves it. Pro
The Mac itself: CPU maxed out, memory running out, running hot, or the GPU saturated by video effects.
The card says which, and which app used the CPU. Pro
Kilobat notices a call when Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, Slack, Webex, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal or a browser on Meet uses the microphone. It never hears or records the call.
About five minutes before a calendar event with a Zoom, Meet, Teams or similar link, Kilobat checks the line in ten seconds: other apps’ traffic, the Wi-Fi, a hundred quick pings, AirDrop and the Mac’s load. It tells you only when something would freeze the call, such as “Dropbox is uploading and Wi-Fi is weak”, with a button to pause them until the call ends.
When the call starts, Kilobat suspends Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Backblaze, Steam, Battle.net, Creative Cloud and other sync, backup and download apps that are running, and refuses their new connections. Pause AirDrop too, if you like. They resume the moment the call ends, or after three hours at most. Apple’s own iCloud and update services are never suspended.
ProA notification and a card in Health › Calls: ping, jitter and loss, each freeze on a timeline, what caused it and what to try. Kilobat counts the freezes for free; Pro names each cause.
FreeReports
Each card says what happened in plain words. “Froze 3 times. Dropbox was uploading.” “Froze twice. The Wi-Fi dropped out.” When it’s your provider, the report button in Health makes a summary of outages, latency and speed tests over 24 hours or 7 days, ready to send. It leaves out your network’s name, local addresses and device names.
# Recent calls, each freeze, its length and cause
$ kilobat calls
# The same for scripts
$ kilobat calls --json --limit 20
# A report for your provider or IT desk
$ kilobat support-report --hours 168 --markdownAI agents read the cards through the MCP tool get_call_reports. Read the docs.
Will this call hold up? A speed test for capacity, and a stutter test for the short spikes that speed tests average away.
kilobat calls and the MCP tool for agentsPro is $19 once for two Macs, with a 7-day free trial and 14-day refunds. Free for students.
No. It only sees that an app is using the microphone, which macOS shows anyway. It never opens the microphone, hears audio or knows who you’re talking to. Everything stays on your Mac.
Zoom, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime, Slack huddles, Webex, Discord, Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal, plus calls in Chrome, Safari, Arc, Edge, Firefox and Brave, such as Google Meet and Teams on the web.
Speed tests measure how much fits through the line, not how steady it is. Calls need every packet on time. One upload in the background or a second of Wi-Fi trouble freezes a call without changing the speed test.
Only for the check before meetings, which you turn on. It looks on your Mac for events with a meeting link starting in the next few minutes, and keeps nothing about them.
Yes. Kilobat writes down every app it suspends before it does, so a quit, a crash or the three-hour limit always resumes it, and the app carries on where it stopped. Switch to a held app and it resumes at once.
Kilobat counts the freezes for free. Kilobat Pro, $19 once with a 7-day free trial, names each cause, shows what to try and adds Call mode.
brew install seifip/kilobat/kilobat