- All enabled providers refresh together: once at launch, then every 5 minutes (a fixed cadence — there's no setting for it). Opening the popover does not start a second automatic pass. Providers fetch in parallel — one slow provider doesn't delay the others.
- Turning a provider on (yourself in Customize, or automatically by first-launch/new-provider detection) fetches it promptly instead of waiting out the interval — even when the change lands in the middle of a refresh that's already running.
- The Dashboard and Settings footer shows
Next update in Nm. Clicking it (or pressing ⌘R while that footer is present) refreshes immediately, skipping the cache. - The one-shot
openusagecommand reuses this same persisted cache for five minutes, refreshes missing or stale entries without starting the app, and exits.openusage --forceruns the same forced provider refresh as ⌘R regardless of cache age. - While a provider is fetching, a small spinner appears next to its name (and one shows in the footer beside the countdown), so you can tell a refresh is in flight rather than wondering if the numbers are stale.
- With iCloud Sync on, a refresh batch writes one machine-history file after the whole batch finishes. Manual provider refreshes write after that provider finishes, and adjacent changes are debounced into one write.
Snapshots are cached on disk and load instantly at launch, so you see your last-known values immediately instead of placeholders — even before the first fetch finishes.
A cached value only counts as fresh (skip-a-refresh fresh) when it was fetched during the current running session. So a value cached in an earlier session always re-fetches on the first pass after launch — you still see it instantly, but the app never waits out the old interval before getting live numbers. This matters after an update: a new app version refreshes right away instead of showing the previous version's data until its interval lapses. Within a session, a freshly fetched value then counts as fresh for one refresh interval before the next pass re-fetches it.
A failed refresh never wipes your data: the last good values stay on screen, and a small warning triangle appears next to the provider's name — hover it for the error message (e.g. "Not logged in"). The error clears on the next successful refresh.
The last good normalized history is preserved too, so a temporary provider failure—or a successful limit refresh whose local log scan is temporarily unavailable—does not remove this Mac's previous contribution from an iCloud-combined spend total.
Rows that have never had data show "No data" rather than made-up numbers.
Because a failed refresh keeps the last good values on screen, those values can persist if refreshes keep failing — so a plan or limit that changed on the provider's side could otherwise keep showing the old figures indefinitely. To make that obvious, a small "Outdated" tag appears next to the provider's name once its data is more than a couple of refresh cycles old (about ten minutes); hover it for the precise age ("Last updated 3h ago"). The tag stays short so it never crowds a long plan name. When you see it, the numbers below are from that earlier time, not live — usually because the provider is failing to refresh (check the warning triangle) or the Mac was asleep. A successful refresh clears it.