find-my-ports is a native Mac utility that gives developers a live, at-a-glance view of every open local port on their machine alongside their active Vercel deployments — all from a single menubar interface.
What is find-my-ports?
find-my-ports is a lightweight Mac app that sits in your menubar and consolidates two things developers constantly juggle: which ports are bound on localhost right now, and what's deployed on Vercel. Instead of running lsof -i in a terminal or opening the Vercel dashboard in a browser, you click one icon and everything is visible at once.
I stumbled onto it after spending an embarrassing amount of time debugging a "port already in use" crash during a local dev session where I had three Next.js projects, a FastAPI service, and a PostgreSQL instance all fighting for attention. find-my-ports changed how I think about that class of problem entirely.
What does find-my-ports do best?
The app genuinely excels at reducing the friction between your local dev environment and your cloud previews. The port list updates in real time — when you spin up next dev it appears immediately; when you kill it, it vanishes. No refresh, no terminal tab-switching.
The Vercel integration is the part that surprised me most. Rather than treating remote deployments as a separate concern you'd check in a browser, find-my-ports surfaces them right next to your local servers. You can see at a glance whether the branch you're testing locally already has a matching preview URL live on Vercel. For teams that use Vercel heavily, this collapses a surprising number of context switches into a single look.
- Instant port visibility — see every open dev port without touching a terminal
- Vercel deployment panel — preview and production URLs without opening a browser tab
- Kill misbehaving processes — terminate the process occupying a port directly from the UI
- Menubar-native — zero dock clutter; always one click away
Is find-my-ports free?
find-my-ports is free to download from the official site. Check the app's own pricing page for the current tier breakdown, as the offering may evolve — but the core port-management functionality has been available without a paywall, with Vercel integration available on a connected account basis.
Who should use find-my-ports?
Frontend and full-stack developers who deploy to Vercel are the obvious primary audience. If you routinely run more than two local servers simultaneously — say, an API, a web client, and a database admin panel — the app pays for itself in saved lsof commands within the first hour.
It's less obviously useful if you're not a Vercel customer; the port management alone is handy, but tools like Proxyman or even a well-configured terminal alias cover that case adequately. Where find-my-ports earns its place is specifically at the intersection of local development chaos and Vercel-hosted previews — if that's your daily reality, it fits like it was built for you (it was).
Compared to using the Vercel CLI directly or relying on lsof -i TCP -sTCP:LISTEN, the UX difference is stark. Those tools are powerful but they demand you go to them. find-my-ports sits passively and answers when asked.
What are the best find-my-ports alternatives?
For pure port inspection, Proxyman offers far deeper traffic analysis (it's a full HTTP proxy), but it's heavy and expensive for the simple use-case. iStatistica and Little Snitch both surface network connections but are oriented around security monitoring rather than dev workflow. On the CLI side, lsof -i -P | grep LISTEN is always free, always there, and always annoying. find-my-ports occupies a niche none of these quite fill: it is intentionally narrow, intentionally fast, and intentionally Vercel-aware. If you want a Swiss Army knife, look elsewhere; if you want a scalpel for this specific problem, this is it.
How does find-my-ports compare to the Vercel CLI?
The Vercel CLI (vercel ls, vercel inspect) gives you richer control over deployments — promoting, rolling back, managing environment variables. find-my-ports doesn't compete there. What it offers instead is passive, persistent awareness: you don't run a command, you simply glance at the menubar. Think of it as a read-only ambient display of your Vercel state that lives alongside your local port map. They complement each other rather than compete.
