Why pay for a clock your Mac already has?
Yes — a clock is worth paying for when you want it to be an object in the room rather than a number you have to go and check, and Horologe is $5.99, paid once. It shows the time and strikes the hour.
What that buys, in prose: four faces — Mantel, Station, Chronometer, Nocturne; five bells — Westminster, Whittington, Ship's Bell, Temple Bowl, Grandfather; quarters on or off and the hour counted either way; quiet hours silent from 10pm to 8am; a right-click on the menu-bar bell to mute. It's about three and a half megabytes, needs macOS 15 or later, and comes from the Mac App Store.
The readout and the object
Your Mac already tells the time, in the corner of the menu bar. It does its job, and it does it silently: it answers when you look. The trouble is that looking is a decision. At 2:40 on a deep afternoon, you don't make it. It is, and you haven't looked at it in an hour.
A clock on the desk is the other kind of thing. You didn't consult it; it told you. A bell at three o'clock is addressed to the room, not to you, and there's nothing to open, answer or dismiss. The hour arrives on its own.
What the free clock already does
To be plain: the menu bar clock is free, it's accurate, and for plenty of people it's enough. macOS will even speak the time aloud every hour if you ask it to, under System Settings → Control Center → Clock options. That's a sentence, not a bell, and it's genuinely useful. If a spoken time is all you want, use it.
What $5.99 buys
You're buying a sound and an object. The sound is a bell computed from a real bell's partials the moment it strikes, so it decays the way metal does instead of stopping dead. The object is a window you can size and place, wearing one of four faces. Both are the same purchase: one payment, no account, no renewal.
And the limits, at the same size as everything else: no alarms, no timers, no world clocks, no ticking. It can ring in the middle of a call, because it can't see your screen or your calendar — that's why muting is deliberately one right-click on the menu-bar bell.
Horologe is $5.99 once. For the longer version of that menu-bar question, read the menu bar clock and the clock behind it; for how to set it up on day one, read how to make your Mac chime every hour.
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