Hazel: how to decide what you need

The store page has three lines on it. A single licence, a family pack, an upgrade. That is a short list by software standards, and yet the decision stalls, because the page cannot answer the questions that actually decide it: whether the app runs on the Mac in front of you, whether anyone else in the house needs it, and whether two weeks of trial will be enough to tell. Settle those three and the line to buy is usually obvious before the prices are read at all.

What follows is the order that gets there fastest, along with the facts that are published and the one place where the published facts disagree with each other.

Check the system requirement yourself, because the site gives two numbers

Start with the Mac, not the price. Hazel 6 is current, and the official pages state its requirement twice, differently. The Hazel 6 FAQ says version 6.0 requires macOS 13.0 Ventura or later. The installation page of the user guide says Hazel 6 requires macOS 12 Monterey or later. That is a one release gap, on the same site, about the same product.

No explanation for the difference is published, and guessing at one is not useful. What matters is the handling. Anyone on Ventura or newer is clear either way. Anyone still on Monterey or Big Sur, which is common on Macs kept past their update window, should treat the higher number as the working answer and ask the developer before paying, rather than buying and discovering it after. Apple Silicon is not in question: the FAQ states that all Apple Silicon Macs are supported.

This step takes a minute and removes the worst outcome, which is a licence bought for a machine that cannot run the version it unlocks.

The three lines, and the condition attached to the middle one

With the machine settled, the licence follows from who else is involved.

Line	Price	What decides it
Single user	$42	One person using it
Family pack	$65	Up to five members of one household
Upgrade	$20	A licence for any previous version already exists

The family pack has a condition that is easy to read past. The store page describes it as a licence for up to five members of your household, and adds that it is for private households only. The unit is a household, not a Mac count and not a team, so a group of colleagues splitting one is outside what the page describes.

The upgrade line is flat. It costs the same whether the existing licence is a single user or a family pack, and the type carries over, so a family pack upgrade produces a family pack. The process asks for the old licence file to be uploaded, which is worth knowing in advance, because the usual place that file lives is an email from the year it was bought. Anyone who cannot find it should use the lost licence page before starting a purchase. There is also a recent exception: purchases made during 2024 were eligible for a free upgrade to the current major version, so a licence bought in that window may cost nothing to bring forward.

Not a subscription, so compare it by the year

The FAQ is explicit that this is not a subscription. A licence brings free updates within the major version it unlocks, and it continues to unlock that version after a newer one is released. Nothing stops working when a major version ships.

That makes the honest comparison an annual one. Major versions have arrived years apart, with Hazel 5 in December 2020 and Hazel 6 as the current release. Take a four year span: $42 to start, $20 to move to the next major version, $62 in total, about $15 a year. Any tool priced monthly has to be measured against that figure rather than against the single $42, and a tool priced monthly that is cheaper per year is a genuinely different offer rather than a worse one. The same arithmetic is what makes the family pack simple to judge: $65 once across five people in a household is a different scale of question entirely.

Design the fourteen days instead of browsing them

The trial is where most of the real decision happens, and it has a defined shape. Without registration Hazel runs in Evaluation mode for 14 days with every feature except rule export available. When that ends it becomes Demo mode, which monitors one folder and allows two active rules, with import and export disabled.

Two weeks spent clicking through features tells you very little. Two weeks spent as follows tells you almost everything:

• Pick one folder that genuinely fills up, usually Downloads, and only that folder
• Write one rule against files that actually arrive, not a hypothetical one
• Use the rule preview while editing to confirm the condition matches what was intended
• Open the rule status window to see which rules each file in the folder matches
• Check the log after a few days to see the processing recorded per file

Those three observation tools, preview, status and log, are what separate a rule engine from a script, and whether they suit the way you work is the thing worth testing. Writing fifteen rules in the first weekend has the opposite effect, because by day ten nothing in the folder can be attributed to any particular rule.

The end state is also informative. If the workflow still functions under Demo mode limits, one folder and two rules, then the automation is small enough that the built-in pieces of macOS would carry it, and the purchase is optional rather than necessary.

Where the rules live afterwards, and why that affects when to buy

One consequence of the trial design is easy to miss until it bites. Rule export is the single feature switched off during Evaluation mode, and it stays off in Demo mode along with import. That means a rule set built during the trial cannot be exported for safekeeping until a licence is entered, and a rule set built during the trial is exactly the thing worth keeping.

The practical effect is on timing rather than on money. Anyone planning to build a substantial rule set, or to run the same rules on more than one Mac, is better off buying early in the trial rather than at the end of it, because the tools for moving rules around only exist on the paid side. The user guide covers importing, exporting and syncing rules as three separate topics, so all three routes exist once the licence is in place.

That also settles a question that often arrives later: whether two Macs need identical rule sets at all. Giving each machine a role, one that receives documents and one that files them, removes the synchronisation problem entirely. Running the same rules in two places without agreeing which machine is authoritative produces two rules with the same name and different conditions, and no way to tell which one is current.

Decide in advance how much access to hand over

Automation of this kind needs broad read access, and the installation page is clear about where. Trash related features require Full Disk Access, granted in System Settings under Privacy, followed by a quit and reopen so the app picks up the new permission. A notification prompt appears on first run.

There is a complication documented by the developer directly. When an app bundle contains more than one executable, macOS sometimes asks for permission for the helper executables separately, and the name shown in the privacy list is the team ID joined to the bundle ID rather than anything readable. Seeing an unfamiliar string appear in Full Disk Access after an update is therefore expected behaviour rather than a sign of something wrong.

The decision here is not technical. It is whether granting a background process full read access to the disk is acceptable for the work being automated. For household paperwork it usually is. For a machine holding client material under an agreement that restricts processing, it is a question worth answering before installing rather than after.

The question the price list cannot answer

The last condition is about the files, not the software: does sorting them require reading what is inside them?

If the rules can be written from name, date, kind, size and where a download came from, that is attribute matching, and Smart Folders plus a short script cover a good deal of it. If the rules need the text inside a document, because invoices arrive with meaningless filenames and only the vendor name inside identifies them, that is a different capability. Hazel 6 performs text recognition on the fly, so PDFs that were never OCRed and plain images can still be matched on their contents, and it reads encrypted PDFs when given a password, which it stores in the keychain.

Two scope limits belong in the same decision. Subfolders of a watched folder are not processed unless a rule explicitly descends into them using the "Run rules on folder contents" action. The Sync action is one way, and deletions in the source are not mirrored to the destination by default, which the manual states while pointing at dedicated sync software for two way work. Neither is a defect, but both change what a purchase will and will not deliver.

Buying now against waiting for the next version

The last hesitation is usually about timing, and the published history makes it tractable. Hazel 5 arrived in December 2020 and Hazel 6 is the current release, so major versions are separated by years rather than months. Waiting for the next one is therefore a wait of unknown length measured in years, during which the folder stays full.

The upgrade price caps the downside of not waiting. Moving to a later major version costs $20 regardless of when the original licence was bought, and buyers from 2024 were given the current upgrade at no cost, which suggests recent purchases before a release are treated reasonably rather than penalised. Discounts do happen, though not on a schedule: the developer blog announced 35 percent off across the store for one weekend in September 2026 to mark twenty years since the first release. For a purchase that is not urgent, watching for a milestone is a reasonable strategy. For a purchase that fixes a daily annoyance, the arithmetic favours buying and treating any later discount as irrelevant.

What to change first

Answer three things in order: which macOS is running, whether anyone else in the household needs it, and what the folder that overflows actually requires, attributes or content. That sequence ends at one line on the store page in most cases. If the answer to the third is that the files need judging rather than sorting, the useful change is the window they are judged in, with the file list, a terminal and a place to state the rule in words in one place. Atriens takes that approach, Compared with other file managers sets out where it overlaps with rule based tools, and Pricing shows where the free and paid boundary sits.