Why I Built iCloud Cleaner

A few months ago I checked my Apple subscriptions and noticed something annoying. I was paying $2.99 per month for 200 GB of iCloud storage. I had been paying it for years. Not a huge amount, but $36 a year for something I never really thought about started to bother me.

So I decided to actually look at what was using all that space. And that is when the real frustration started.

The mess inside my iCloud

I opened Settings, went to iCloud, and found the storage breakdown. Here is what was eating my 200 GB:

• Old iPhone backups taking up 50+ GB. I had backups from two phones ago just sitting there. Phones I no longer owned.
• node_modules syncing from my Desktop. I am a developer. I keep projects on my Desktop sometimes. Apple was happily uploading every node_modules folder to the cloud. Hundreds of thousands of tiny files, gigabytes of npm packages, all synced to iCloud for no reason.
• Random screenshots. Every screenshot I ever took on my Mac was synced. Most of them were throwaway captures of bugs I was debugging or UI states I wanted to share in a Slack message once.
• WhatsApp media. Years of forwarded memes, voice messages, and group chat photos that I never asked to be backed up.

In total, probably 80% of my iCloud storage was junk I did not need or want.

Trying to clean up manually

I spent about an hour trying to fix this through Apple's own tools. It was painful. The iCloud settings on Mac are buried and confusing. Deleting old backups requires multiple confirmation dialogs and scary warnings. Figuring out which photos are only in iCloud versus also on your device is genuinely unclear. And there is no way to tell Apple to stop syncing specific folders like node_modules.

I gave up halfway through. It felt like Apple designed the cleanup experience to be just annoying enough that most people give up and keep paying.

Maybe that is not intentional. But it sure feels that way when you are the one trying to cancel.

Building the thing I needed

I am an indie developer from Romania. I build side projects when something bothers me enough. This bothered me enough.

I built iCloud Cleaner as a native macOS app using SwiftUI. Not an Electron wrapper. Not a web app pretending to be a desktop app. A real Mac app that feels like it belongs on your machine. It scans your iCloud Drive, finds the junk, categorizes it, and lets you clean it up in a few clicks.

The app finds old device backups, developer artifacts like node_modules and .git folders, cache files, duplicate screenshots, and all the other stuff that silently fills up your iCloud. It shows you exactly what is eating your storage and lets you decide what to remove.

Why $4.99, one time

I priced it at $4.99 as a one-time purchase because I hate subscriptions. The whole reason I built this app is that I was tired of a subscription. It would be deeply ironic to charge a monthly fee for a tool that helps you cancel a monthly fee.

The math is simple. If you are paying Apple $0.99 per month for 50 GB, the app pays for itself in five months. If you are on the $2.99 plan like I was, it pays for itself in the first month. After that, it is just savings.

What happened next

After running iCloud Cleaner on my own Mac, I freed up about 120 GB. I deleted the old backups, removed the developer junk, and cleared out the screenshots and media I did not need. I downgraded back to Apple's free 5 GB plan and cancelled the subscription I had been paying for years.

That was the whole point. Build a tool, solve the problem, stop paying. If you are in the same situation, maybe it can do the same for you.