Sitful

Sitful is a Mac app that watches how you sit. It shows a live posture score, 0 to 100, in your menu bar. Using your webcam, it tracks your head, your shoulders, and how far you have leaned toward the screen, and it scores them every second. It is built for one thing: the forward-head slouch behind what people now call tech neck, the kind you cannot feel yourself doing.

What sets it apart from a phone alarm is restraint. Most posture apps get muted by week two because they nag on a timer. Sitful measures real posture with on-device vision, Google’s MediaPipe. It speaks up only after you have genuinely slouched, and the better you sit, the quieter it goes. The clever part is AirPods. A camera can only guess the angle of your head, but supported AirPods (Pro, Max, or third-generation and newer) report real motion down to a fraction of a degree. Sitful blends that with the camera, so a quick nod does not fool the score. Skip the AirPods and it still runs on the camera alone.

Privacy is the part Sitful gets clearly right, because it is built in, not just promised. Frames are scored on your Mac and thrown away on the spot. There is no account, no cloud, and no telemetry, and posture tracking runs even with the Wi-Fi off. The one string attached is the license. It checks in online about once a week, and each check buys fourteen days, so you can work offline for a stretch but have to reconnect within two weeks.

The other limits are honest ones. Sitful runs only on Apple Silicon Macs, macOS 12 and up. Intel Macs and every non-Mac are out. There is no free trial either. You start at $4.99 a month or pay $29 once for life, with a seven-day refund to fall back on. That one-time $29 is the nice surprise: no charging, and a fraction of what wearables like Upright Go cost. One cost we could not measure is the app’s own footprint. An always-on camera spends battery and runs warm, and how much, we did not test.

Our take: if you spend your day on an Apple Silicon Mac and your neck has started to complain, Sitful is a low-risk thing to try. Start monthly or buy it outright, calibrate in about fifteen seconds, and give it two weeks, with the refund as your safety net. What we cannot tell you yet is whether “calm, not naggy” holds up once a real deadline has you hunched over the keyboard. That is the thing that decides whether it is still running a month from now.