Dock Groups
Group your Mac Dock apps by project and launch or quit whole
Every time I started a project I opened the same five apps, one by one. When I switched to something else I quit them the same way. macOS has no concept of app groups in the Dock, and after a few years of doing this manually it started to bother me more than it should have.
I tried the existing launchers and Dock replacements first. None of them stuck. Most were much heavier than my problem needed: themes, window previews, a settings screen with six tabs. The rest took over the Dock entirely, which meant relearning where everything was. I already liked my Dock. I just wanted groups in it.
So I wrote a script. Then the script became an app.
Then I posted it to r/macapps to find out whether anyone else had this problem or whether I'd built something only I would ever use. Turned out plenty of people had it, and the thread stopped being feedback and started being a spec. Reorder groups by dragging them. Right-click menus so you're not opening settings for everything. Add apps from inside the group panel instead of a separate window. I built all three over the next few weeks and posted back in the same thread each time something shipped.
DockGroups lets you make named groups (Dev Setup, Writing, Client Work) and launch or quit the whole set in one click. It runs on top of the native Dock without replacing or modifying it. The feature that changed the app was standalone mode: any group can become its own Dock icon you pin permanently, with no helper app running behind it. I nearly cut it twice for being too fiddly to get right, and it's now the thing people mention most.
Two months in: 44 Pro licenses at a one-time $9.99, zero refunds,
Native Swift, all data local, privacy manifest, no tracking, no subscription. Free tier is 2 groups with no time limit.
8 Comments
the no-time-limit free tier is doing a lot of quiet work there, people can sit in 2 groups forever and still end up paying.
one thing from the payments side: at $9.99 one-time the number that bites is disputes, not refunds. a stripe dispute is a $15 fee on top of the $9.99 going back, so a single one wipes out about two and a half sales, and they land much later than refund requests do. cardholders get months, so at two months your earliest sales are only halfway through the window.
depends how you sell it though. app store or a merchant of record like paddle and it never touches you. if it's direct, cheapest fix is making the statement descriptor say DOCKGROUPS rather than an LLC name nobody recognizes six weeks later.
Good breakdown, and the timing point is the part I hadn’t thought through — refunds surface fast, disputes don’t, so at two months my earliest sales are still inside the window.
I’m on Polar as merchant of record, which I’d assumed insulated me from this. It doesn’t. Their terms pass the chargeback back to me in full, they keep their fee on the reversed sale, and there’s a $15 per-dispute charge deducted from balance regardless of outcome. So on a $9.99 product one dispute costs closer to three sales than two and a half. What MoR actually buys me is the tax side — no VAT registrations, no remittance — plus they handle the representment, which I’d be bad at.
The descriptor point still stands and is the cheap fix. Worth me checking what actually shows on a statement, since the failure mode is someone not recognizing a line item six weeks later. Zero disputes so far, though as you say two months isn’t long enough to claim that.
there's a third thing polar buys you that you didn't count: the ratio. the disputes get counted against polar's merchant account with the card networks, not yours, and networks put merchants whose dispute ratio climbs into monitoring programs, which means higher fees and eventually losing the ability to process. the money still lands on you, that exposure doesn't. and since they take the $15 either way, a won representment only claws back the $9.99, so at your price not fighting one is a fine call rather than a reckless one.
Congrats on the traction! Amazing that one subreddit drove 44 pro licenses. Shows how powerful niche communities can be.
That’s a great example of how niche communities can drive traction. Amazing that r/macapps basically turned into a feature spec for you — shows how powerful the right subreddit can be compared to generic feedback forms.
Thanks. It helped that r/macapps is people who already have the problem. It also helped that i had to provide similar products in the post and make comparison. The thread turned into a feature spec faster than any feedback form would have.
44 paid licenses with zero refunds is a meaningful signal.
What seems unresolved is whether you've validated DockGroups itself, or DockGroups specifically within r/macapps — those aren't necessarily the same thing.
That distinction becomes more important now that the original feedback thread has also shaped so much of the product.
The standalone mode becoming its own Dock icon is one of those details that sounds small until you picture using it. I can see why people kept bringing that up.
Reading this I kept thinking it feels like it should be getting a lot more organic traffic than it probably is already. With only two months in that would make a real difference while people are still discovering it.
Do you get the same feeling or is that just me?