For the Mac

Watch YouTube without YouTube watching you.

No account. No adverts. No analytics, no profile, nothing sent anywhere. Your subscriptions, your history and your lists live in one file on your own machine — and one button deletes the lot.

Download Telly — free What's in it

macOS 12 or later · Apple silicon · signed and notarised by Apple

TV Mode · drawn, not photographed

The whole thing is free. All of it.

Everything below costs nothing and always will. There's one paid extra, and it's the one you could live without.

Your subscriptions, in order

Newest first, from the channels you actually follow. No algorithm deciding what you meant.

No adverts

Not blocked — never fetched. See below; it's a better story than a blocklist.

Keep videos on your disk

Download anything, in the format you want. Yours whatever YouTube does next.

A mini player

A small always-on-top window that keeps playing while you work.

Lists and channel groups

Sort what you follow into groups. Save videos to lists you name yourself.

Stats nobody else keeps

What you watched, how much of your feed was Shorts, which channels you never actually watch. Counted on your machine, shown only to you.

Three promises, and how each one is kept

01

No adverts, structurally. Telly draws an allow-list of things — videos and channels. Every advert YouTube sends is a different kind of object, and Telly has no code that can draw one. It isn't a blocklist that needs updating; there's nowhere for an advert to appear. A test in the source enforces it.

02

No account, ever. There's no sign-in because there's nothing to sign in to. Telly reads the same public feeds your RSS reader could.

03

Nothing about you leaves the machine. No analytics, no crash pings, no "anonymous usage data". The only time Telly talks to anything but YouTube is if you buy a licence, and then it sends the key and nothing else.

Why you can check rather than trust. An automated test blocks any connection to a host that isn't YouTube. If a future version tried to phone home, the build would fail before it ever reached you.

And then there's TV Mode.

Watching inside an actual television. A 1983 set drawn knob by knob, with a VCR underneath that takes your playlists as VHS tapes. Turn the channel knob and you get static, a roll, and the next programme. There's a working aerial, ten rooms to put it in, things to arrange around it, and the picture throws light back onto the wall. It makes the right noises. The clock radio tells the actual time.

None of that makes videos play better. It isn't supposed to. It's there because watching something should be able to feel like something, and every other player gave that up years ago.

$19 Once. Not a subscription, not a renewal, and it doesn't expire.
Three free minutes a week, forever. Whether you buy it or not. It refills every week, so you can have another look in week eight if week one didn't land.

Made by one person, on purpose

I’m Maddie, and I make Telly entirely on my own — one autistic developer who cares, maybe a little too much, about getting the small things right.

Building these is how I earn my living. Ordinary jobs have never fitted the way my head is wired, so I built something that does: apps I’d want myself, supported directly by the people who use them. No investors, no company taking a cut, nobody upstairs asking why the free version isn’t worse.

That last part is why Telly works the way it does. There's no plan where the good bits get taken away later and sold back to you.

Get it

Free, signed and notarised by Apple, so it opens without any warnings or right-click tricks. It updates itself from then on.

Download Telly

macOS 12 or later · Apple silicon

Privacy policy

Short, because there isn't much to say. This is the whole of it.

01

Telly collects nothing about you. No account, no analytics, no crash reports, no "anonymous usage statistics", no advertising identifiers. There is no server to collect it to.

02

Everything stays on your Mac. Your subscriptions, watch history, lists, downloads and settings live in one file in your own Library folder. Delete the app and they go with it, or use the button in Settings to wipe them whenever you like.

03

What Telly connects to. YouTube, to fetch the videos and feeds you asked for — the same requests any browser makes, without an account attached. GitHub, to check for a new version of Telly and to fetch updates of yt-dlp, the tool that downloads videos; both are outbound only and carry nothing about you.

04

Sponsor skipping, only if you switch it on. Off by default. When on, Telly asks SponsorBlock where the adverts are in a video — but it asks by a four-character code derived from the video's id, which thousands of other videos share, and picks the answer out on your machine. SponsorBlock never learns what you're watching. It's the only feature that contacts anyone but YouTube.

05

If you buy a licence. Your key is checked with Polar, the payment provider, and encrypted into your Mac's Keychain. That request contains your key and nothing else. Polar handles the payment and holds your billing details under their own policy; Telly never sees a card number.

06

No third-party trackers, ever. No fonts loaded from a CDN, no embedded analytics, no tag managers. This website has none either — no cookies, nothing stored, no visitor logging beyond what any web host keeps.

How you can check rather than trust me. An automated test watches every network request the app makes and fails the build if one goes anywhere but the hosts above. It isn't a policy I remember to follow; it's a gate the code has to pass before it can reach you.

Questions: the app's About screen has how to reach me. Last updated August 2026.