An honest comparison. On the core "keep my Mac awake while an agent works" job, AgentBarista, Agent Caffeine, and even free Amphetamine are all reasonable choices. Here's where they're actually different — and where they're not.
No trash talk, just the facts — re-checked against each vendor's live site
"Detect an AI agent and stop the Mac sleeping" is not a hard problem anymore, and we're not going to pretend it is. A free tool does this. A $9 app does this. We do this too. If that's literally all you need, you have good free and cheap options and you should take one of them.
caffeinate command is a fine choice. Don't pay for a problem
that's already solved for you.
Prices and feature claims below are taken from each vendor's own site, checked again before this page was published.
| Feature | AgentBarista | Agent Caffeine | Amphetamine / caffeinate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 one-time (founding $15), or $39 lifetime | $9 one-time, lifetime updates | Free |
| Pricing model | One-time — not a subscription | One-time — not a subscription | Free, no purchase |
| Detects specific AI agents | Yes — 12+ named agents | Yes — 40+ preloaded, editable allowlist | No — Amphetamine triggers on any process/CPU rule you set up yourself; caffeinate has no agent awareness at all |
| Detects "thinking" turns at ~0% CPU | Yes — Accessibility text matching, not just CPU | Not stated on their site either way | No — CPU/process triggers only |
| Keeps working with the lid closed | Supported, battery-fragile — see below | Lid-closed supported (their claim) | caffeinate supports it; depends on your own flags |
| Battery safety cutoff | Yes — won't drain the battery overnight | Not stated on their site | No — you're responsible for not draining your battery |
| Shows you what it actually saved | Yes — ROI view of time/runs protected | No | No |
| Network calls | One: license validation (license key + your Mac's name). No telemetry or analytics in the app. This website separately uses cookieless analytics. | None, by their own claim | None |
| Reads file contents / code / prompts | Never opens them. With Accessibility granted it reads the on-screen text of the agent apps you enable and of supported terminals, which can include your code — matched locally, never stored, never sent | No, by their own claim | No |
| Team manager dashboard | Coming — Team plan, pilot partners shape it | No | No |
| MDM / Jamf central deploy | Coming — Team plan, pilot partners shape it | No | No |
| Lock-on-lid security | Yes — Team plan | No | No |
| Per-seat billing for a fleet | Yes — $24/seat/year, volume pricing at 100+ seats | No — single-Mac purchase only | No |
Where a row says “not stated on their site”, the competitor's current site doesn't claim that behavior one way or the other — we'd rather say that than guess. Lid-closed behavior is something we genuinely have not stress-tested on real hardware over a full night yet, so we're not going to oversell it here either.
We won't promise your agent survives a closed lid overnight on battery — that's real but fragile, and we haven't verified it thoroughly enough to put our name on it as a guarantee. What we will promise:
Instead of stalling when you step away. True lid open or closed, plugged in or on battery — that's the actual job, and it's the one we're confident in.
Sleep prevention turns off within your grace window — 90 seconds by default — after the agent goes idle. No held-awake Mac burning battery for no reason after the job is finished.
We don't win this category on "we keep the Mac awake better" — that part is commoditized. We win on the parts free tools don't build:
AgentBarista never opens your files. To tell a working agent from a finished one it looks at process command lines and CPU, at the names and modification times of your agents' session files, and — only if you grant macOS Accessibility permission — at the on-screen text of the agent apps you enable and of the terminals we support. Two of those can contain your own words: a command line includes any prompt you pass on it, and on-screen text includes whatever is visible in that window, your code included. Both are matched against status phrases on your Mac and discarded on the spot: never stored, never sent. Nothing about your work leaves your Mac — no file contents, no code, no prompts, no file names, no activity data. Your stats and settings stay on this Mac. The app contains no analytics or telemetry of any kind. Its one network call is license validation, sent to our payment provider, Lemon Squeezy: activating a license sends your license key and your Mac's name, and the routine check after that sends your license key and an anonymous instance id — nothing else. Agent Caffeine and Amphetamine make similar no-telemetry claims on their own sites; we're not disputing that, and we'd rather state our one carve-out than pretend we have none.
No card required to start. If free Amphetamine or Agent Caffeine already does what you need, that's a perfectly good outcome too.
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