Dorso is a free, open-source Mac menubar app that silently tracks how long you have been sitting still and nudges you to straighten up before your neck starts paying the price.
What is Dorso?
Dorso is a lightweight posture-monitoring utility for macOS that lives entirely in your menubar and uses your Mac's built-in camera to detect when your posture has drifted — then gently reminds you to sit up. It costs nothing, collects nothing, and demands almost no configuration to be immediately useful.
The premise is simple and the execution is clean: Dorso watches your position through the FaceTime camera, establishes a baseline for what "good posture" looks like at your desk, and fires a notification whenever you stray from it for too long. No subscription, no cloud sync, no account — just a small open-source tool doing one job quietly in the background.
What does Dorso do best?
Dorso's strongest suit is invisibility. Once you calibrate it, it disappears into the menu bar and only surfaces when your body is doing something worth correcting. There's no nagging dashboard to dismiss, no weekly "wellness reports" asking you to rate your mood.
I've run it alongside both Magnet and Bartender for weeks and the menubar footprint is negligible. The camera check happens locally — nothing leaves your machine — which matters if you spend your day on confidential work. For people who already use Time Out or Lungo to manage break rhythms, Dorso slots in as the posture-specific layer those tools don't cover.
- Baseline calibration — sit up tall once, click calibrate, done
- Local-only processing — camera frames are never uploaded anywhere
- Menubar-native — no Dock icon, no persistent window
- Notification-based alerts — integrates with macOS notification centre
- Open source — auditable on GitHub if you want to verify the privacy story yourself
Is Dorso free?
Yes — Dorso is completely free. It is an open-source project hosted on GitHub with no paid tier, no in-app purchases, and no "pro" upgrade. You can download it directly from the repository or install it via Homebrew Cask with a single command.
Who should use Dorso?
Anyone who works long hours at a Mac and has woken up at noon realising they've been hunching over a keyboard since 8 a.m. Dorso is especially well-suited to developers, writers, and designers who enter flow states that last hours — the kind of sessions where a coffee mug goes cold unnoticed.
It is not a replacement for ergonomic furniture, a standing desk, or a physiotherapist. Think of it as the colleague who quietly taps you on the shoulder rather than letting you compound a bad habit for six hours straight. If you are already disciplined about posture, Dorso won't add much; if you are the person who starts every morning resolved to sit up straight and ends every evening with a crick in their neck, it is worth a try.
How does Dorso compare to Time Out?
Time Out is a break-interval scheduler — it tells you to step away from your desk on a timer regardless of what your body is doing. Dorso is reactive: it only alerts you when your camera actually detects that your posture has changed. The two tools address different problems and work well together. Stretchly occupies a similar interval-reminder niche to Time Out but again doesn't watch your body position. Dorso is unique in that it responds to you rather than to a clock.
If your concern is eye strain and micro-break frequency, Time Out or Stretchly are the better picks. If your concern is specifically spinal slouching and forward-head posture, Dorso is the more targeted answer.
What are the best Dorso alternatives?
The honest answer is that the category is thin on the Mac. Uprightpose and Posture Reminder exist but lean toward paid or iOS-first approaches. Time Out and Stretchly handle rest breaks without any posture awareness. Commercial tools like BetterBack (hardware) address the same problem through entirely different means. For a no-cost, Mac-native, camera-aware solution, Dorso currently has the field largely to itself.
