Free during betamacOS 13+ · Universal

Aconsequence-freemode for your Mac.

Stop hesitating before you install, configure, or experiment. Flip the switch and your Mac becomes a save-state of itself. Try anything for an hour. Keep what's worth keeping. Everything else snaps back like it never happened.

Download for Mac

See how it works

Setup in 90 seconds Apple-signed & notarized Open source plumbing Nothing leaves your Mac

MacBook Pro — 14"

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Live demo · loops every 17s

Who it's for

If you've ever hesitated before clicking install,
this is built for you.

The cautious developer

You install Xcode betas in a VM. You hesitate before `npm install`-ing a package you don't recognize. You keep a separate user account for client work.

“I just want to try this thing without it touching `~/.npm` or my git config.”

The careful creator

Your Mac is a tool you depend on. You don't try the new font, the new app, the new accent color — because what if it stuck and you can't put it back?

“I'd love to redesign my dock — but my muscle memory needs the old one.”

The contractor

You juggle SSH keys, env vars, gcloud configs, AWS profiles for three clients. One stray push to the wrong remote and it's a bad week.

“Different clients, different secrets, on the same laptop. There has to be a cleaner way.”

The curious learner

You read the tutorial. The first command runs `sudo`. You don't run it. You wish there was a way to find out what would actually happen.

“What does this do, exactly? Let me try it somewhere it can't hurt.”

How it works

One switch. Two worlds.
You choose what crosses.

Flip the switch

One click in the menu bar. In three seconds, you're inside a perfect copy of your Mac — same wallpaper, same dock, same files. The only difference: nothing that happens here is permanent.

Work normally

Install the app you don't fully trust. Run the script someone DM'd you. Change the system setting you've always wondered about. Your real Mac doesn't move a pixel.

See what changed

Exit when you're done. EscapeBox shows you everything that happened — every file created, app installed, setting changed — in plain English, not a wall of file paths.

Pick what survives

Tick what you want to keep. Click Commit. Those items flow into your real Mac. Everything else is gone, like the session never existed.

It's not a virtual machine

EscapeBox uses APFS clones and a companion user account. Your apps run on real hardware with full GPU. Same performance as your normal Mac — because it is your Mac.

Cloud sync is paused, not leaked

Dropbox, Drive, OneDrive, Figma, iCloud — all paused while you're inside. What syncs to the cloud is exactly what you decided to keep. Nothing more.

Crash-safe by design

If anything goes wrong mid-session, your real Mac is fine. A watchdog resumes your host the second EscapeBox stops responding. There is no fail-into-broken state.

What it's for

Every Mac task that scared you to commit to.

The hesitation costs you. EscapeBox erases it. A few of the things people use it for:

Run anything that scared you

That .dmg from a forum thread. The unsigned beta SDK. The 'just try this' from a colleague. Open it. Watch what it actually does. Decide if it earned a place on your real Mac.

Redesign without commitment

The wallpaper that might be ugly. The font you're 60% sure about. A new dock layout. Try it for an hour.

$ npm install

added 1,247 packages in 18s

$ next build

▲ ready in 3.4s

$ deploy --to=staging

⚠ permissions error

Pollute global state freely

npm install everything. cargo build the world. The framework you've been curious about. Your real `~/.npm` stays pristine.

Dark Mode

Show Ruler

Reduce Motion

Tweak the system without fear

Toggle every switch. Run that `defaults write` command from a 2018 Stack Overflow answer. Edit your shell rc. Exit and your Mac never knew.

Keep clients separated

No accidental pushes to the wrong remote. No mixed gcloud configs. No cross-tenant secrets.

const x = 42

// what if we tried…

function tryIt() {

return magic()

}

Build the half-formed idea

Spin it up. See if it's real. Keep what works. Erase what doesn't — no traces.

Practice the dangerous commands

Run `rm -rf` in a folder that doesn't matter. Edit /etc files to learn what they do. Try the tutorial without reading the warnings.

Or anything else you've wondered about

What would happen if I changed that? Now you can find out — safely, in 90 seconds.

Trust

Designed to be verifiable.

We're not asking you to trust us. We're showing you the receipts. The privileged code is on GitHub. The builds are reproducible. The audit logs are on your disk. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you decide it should.

github.com/dhruvsardana05/escapebox→

Nothing leaves your Mac

No analytics SDKs. No file paths, file names, or contents ever transmitted. The only outbound call: a signed catalog update that sends your app version and nothing else. Watch the network — there's almost no traffic.

Read every privileged line

Everything that touches your Mac at the privileged level is on GitHub. Read it. Build it yourself. Compare the binary you compile to the one we ship — they should match, byte for byte.

Apple verifies us before you do

Every binary signed with Developer ID, notarized by Apple, stapled. macOS verifies the signature before each launch. If something's off, your Mac refuses to run it.

Audited by people you trust

Independent third-party security audit before 1.0, full report published. Bug bounty live at launch. If you find a hole, we pay you to tell us about it.

Download

Stop hesitating. Start trying things.

Free during beta. Setup takes about 90 seconds. Works on every Mac running macOS 13 or later — Apple Silicon and Intel.

Download EscapeBox

Universal binary·~12 MB·v0.1.0-beta

STEP 1

Drag to Applications

Open the .dmg. Drag EscapeBox into your Applications folder. Same as any Mac app.

STEP 2

Allow once in System Settings

macOS asks you to approve the system extension. EscapeBox walks you through the click — about 30 seconds.

STEP 3

Click the menu bar icon

EscapeBox lives in your menu bar. Click it. Hit Enter Sandbox. You're in.

Signed and notarized by Apple. Setup takes about a minute.

FAQ

Honest answers.

No. EscapeBox uses APFS clones and a companion macOS user account — both built into macOS. Your apps run with full native performance, full GPU access, full hardware identity. There is no emulation, no guest OS, no slowdown. It's your actual Mac, just in a protected mode.

Then exit. The sandbox volume and everything inside it are deleted on discard. Whatever you ran can't have written to your real disk — the sandbox is on a different APFS clone with different mount points. Even malware that tries to escape user space hits read-only system paths.

Your real Mac is fine. A separate watchdog daemon detects an interrupted session within 30 seconds and resumes any suspended host processes. The sandbox volume and entry snapshot survive reboot, so you can pick up the session right where you left it.

No. EscapeBox pauses every known cloud-sync daemon and blocks their hostnames at the network layer during a session. When you commit, daemons resume and only the files you kept sync. When you discard, those files never became real — so there's nothing to sync.

By default, no — and that's intentional. The sandbox is a clean identity. Your real iCloud and iMessage are on your real user, untouched. If you want your Apple ID inside, you can opt in during onboarding; those credentials persist in the sandbox keychain only.

No file paths. No file contents. No analytics. Not ever. The only outbound call is a signed JSON catalog update that sends your app version and macOS version — nothing else. Crash reports are opt-in. The full privacy contract is in the source.

Yes — that's the whole point. When you exit, you see a categorized panel of every meaningful change. Tick what you want to keep, click Commit, and only those items become real on your Mac.

Every commit is undoable for 7 days. EscapeBox keeps a pre-merge APFS snapshot so you can roll back to the exact state before your last commit. One click, fully reversed.

Creating an APFS sandbox volume, managing a companion user account, and pausing host processes all require root. The privileged helper is open source — read every line on GitHub. Every privileged operation it runs is logged to a tamper-evident audit log on your disk that you can review at any time.

Yes. EscapeBox ships as a universal binary. Apple Silicon is faster, but Intel is fully supported on macOS 13+.

Free during beta. After 1.0 it's a one-time purchase — no subscriptions. Major-version upgrades may be paid; minor versions and bug fixes are always free.