Your Mac's hard drive is full ... again. What's taking up all that space? Endless applications promise to answer this question and help you free up space, most with a subscription. I've tested many over the years, and few are easier to recommend than Purge.

This totally free, open source app gives you a quick breakdown of what's taking up space on your hard drive and offers a few specific ways to free it up. Even better: There are no ads or upsells. Purge can even delete Apple Intelligence's offline models from macOS 27, which could free up over 10 GB.

But even if you want to keep Apple's AI features, you can still clear up plenty of space. Your Mac, like any computer, tends to build up clutter over time. Sure, you might have forgotten about the games, images, and videos you downloaded, but caches also take up space. These are files downloaded and saved to speed things up, which can be useful. The problem is they can stick around longer than necessary and take up space. And then there are caches and settings left behind by apps you uninstalled ages ago—they're still there, eating up precious bytes.

Purge is designed to help you clean all that out, but it can do more. It's built around lists of files known to be safe to purge. There's also a list of things it will never touch , including crucial system files and your own documents. Finally, Purge sends files to the Trash instead of deleting them outright, so you can always recover them if something breaks.

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