Lungo

Lungo is a paid Mac utility by Sindre Sorhus that prevents your Mac from sleeping on demand, sitting in the menu bar and requiring almost zero configuration.

What is Lungo?

Lungo is a menu-bar app that tells macOS to stay awake — no sleep, no screen dimming, no display timeout — for as long as you need it. Named after the longer espresso pull, it does exactly what that name implies: extends your Mac's wakefulness without touching System Settings or yanking out a USB dongle.

Sindre Sorhus, the prolific indie developer behind dozens of sharp macOS utilities, built Lungo as the refined alternative to freeware hacks. The result is a native SwiftUI app that feels like it ships with the OS rather than bolted on afterward.

What does Lungo do best?

Lungo excels at frictionless, intentional wakefulness — you activate it in one click, choose a duration from a clean popover, and forget about it until the timer expires.

Where competing tools like Amphetamine load you with triggers, rules, and scheduling panels, Lungo's interface is essentially a coffee-cup icon and a duration picker. That restraint is a feature. I've watched colleagues spend five minutes configuring Amphetamine before a presentation; with Lungo I click once and walk to the projector. The app respects the macOS caffeine API properly, so your machine's power assertions don't leak after the session ends — something the old caffeinate terminal trick can silently fail at if you close the Terminal window early.

• One-click activation from the menu bar
• Preset and custom durations (indefinite, 15 min, 1 hr, etc.)
• Keeps display awake or just the system — your choice
• Keyboard shortcut support for the keyboard-first crowd
• Optional auto-activation on specific power adapters

How much does Lungo cost?

Lungo is a paid app, available through the Mac App Store at a modest one-time price — no subscription, no in-app upsell, no nag screen.

For context, you're paying for a native, actively maintained utility from a developer who ships updates reliably and responds to bug reports. Compared to the cognitive overhead of configuring a free alternative every time you need it, the cost is trivial. If budget is the deciding factor, Amphetamine is free and capable; but if you value a tool that gets out of your way, Lungo is worth it.

Who should use Lungo?

Lungo is ideal for anyone who regularly needs their Mac awake during presentations, video calls, long downloads, or remote sessions — without wanting to remember to re-enable sleep afterward.

I use it every time I screen-share during a long design review or leave a build running on a laptop that isn't plugged in. It's also a quiet hero for café workers who step away from their machine for a few minutes and don't want it locked mid-sentence. Developers who frequently SSH into their Mac from another machine will appreciate the indefinite-wakefulness mode; the session won't drop because the lid decided to sleep.

Power users who need conditional automation — "stay awake only when this app is open" or "wake on a schedule" — will find Lungo too minimal. That crowd should look at Amphetamine or the venerable Caffeine. Lungo is for the person who wants a well-crafted single-purpose tool, not a control panel.

What are the best Lungo alternatives?

The main alternatives are Amphetamine (free, feature-rich), Caffeine (free, even simpler, less maintained), and the built-in caffeinate terminal command.

Amphetamine wins on depth — you can trigger it based on running apps, network connections, battery level, or time of day. If you need that conditional logic, Amphetamine is the right tool and it costs nothing. Caffeine is older, works, but hasn't seen meaningful updates in years and lacks duration controls. The caffeinate CLI is always available and free but vanishes if you close the Terminal window accidentally. Lungo sits between Caffeine's simplicity and Amphetamine's complexity — native, polished, and reliable without being overwhelming.

How does Lungo compare to Amphetamine?

Lungo trades Amphetamine's extensive trigger system for a far simpler, faster experience — if you want a rule engine, choose Amphetamine; if you want one click, choose Lungo.

Amphetamine is free and genuinely powerful: it can watch apps, network SSIDs, battery percentage, and calendar events to decide when to stay awake. For an IT administrator or a developer with specific automated needs, that's irreplaceable. But Amphetamine's preferences window has grown to rival some productivity apps in complexity. Lungo makes a different bet: that most people need wakefulness for a bounded task, not a policy framework. In daily use I reach for Lungo because the decision happens in under a second.