Stay Green vs mouse jigglers, keep-awake apps and cloud tools
When your chat status keeps going Away, there are roughly three categories of tools people reach for. Each one solves a real problem. None of them fully solves this one - except the last.
The three categories, and where each falls short
Keep-awake apps (Amphetamine, Caffeine, KeepingYouAwake) stop your Mac from sleeping and prevent the screensaver. They are excellent for downloads, video playback, and unattended scripts. They do not reset the system idle timer, so Teams and Slack still flip you Away on their usual timers. Your screen stays on, your dot goes yellow anyway.
Mouse jigglers and hardware dongles work by sending tiny mouse movements to reset the idle timer. That does keep chat apps active. The catch: your cursor visibly drifts, it interferes while you work, a USB dongle takes up a port, and the movement is obvious if you are on a video call or sharing your screen. Software jigglers that move the cursor have the same problem without the dongle.
Cloud presence tools poll and update your status via the Slack or Teams API from a remote server. They require you to hand an OAuth token to a third party, and that token lives on their infrastructure. If their server goes down, your status management stops. There is also a privacy question: an access token broad enough to set your presence can often read profile data too.
How they compare
| Stay Green | Keep-awake apps | Mouse jigglers | Cloud tools | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keeps chat status green | Yes | No | Usually | Yes |
| Invisible (no cursor movement) | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Auto-pauses when genuinely away | Yes | No | No | No |
| Works for all chat apps at once | Yes | No | Usually | Per-app |
| Nothing leaves your Mac | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| No dongle or extra hardware | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
Stay Green resets the system idle timer using a synthetic F15 keypress and a zero-distance mouse move - no cursor drift, nothing on screen. Because it works at the OS level, one nudge keeps Teams, Slack, Zoom, and Discord active at the same time. It runs in the menu bar, no Dock icon, and auto-pauses when you have actually left so you are not shown as available overnight.
Why Stay Green is a subscription
macOS changes every year. A presence tool has to keep up: system APIs shift, notarization requirements evolve, new macOS security features need testing, and the app sometimes needs updates just to keep doing the same thing it always did. That is ongoing work, not a one-and-done release.
A subscription funds continuous, notarized updates, the signing infrastructure, the license server, and support - the things that make a tool reliable past the first few months. It also pays for the 7-day free trial: you can use Stay Green for a full week without a card, and only pay if it works for you.
The annual plan is the value pick
The annual plan is EUR 19.99 per year, which works out to about EUR 1.67 per month. If you use Stay Green every workday, that is less than a cup of coffee for the month. The monthly plan is EUR 1.99 if you prefer to start there.
For more on specific tools and use cases: keep Microsoft Teams green on Mac, keep Slack green on Mac, and mouse jiggler alternative for Mac.