Perch

A tiny character sits in the corner of your screen and keeps an eye on your numbers.

Perch is a small desktop pet with a speech bubble above it. What the bubble shows is up to you — your PC's vitals, a focus timer, a countdown to a date, today's git commits, or how much of a coding assistant's quota you've burned through. Pick a data source from the right-click menu; switch anytime.

And the pet reacts to it. It breathes slowly when everything's fine, gets a bead of sweat when a number climbs, throws up a little alarm when one goes critical, and hops with joy when you finish something — so you can read your machine's state from across the room without reading anything. Every so often it says something of its own: a greeting, a nudge, a bad joke.

100% local. No account, no API key, no network calls. Everything it shows comes from files already on your own machine. Nothing you do is ever sent anywhere.

What's in the free version

• The full app — every feature, every data source, no time limit, no nagging
• 3 starter characters
• A leveling system: use it daily, finish focus sessions, take your breaks, and the pet earns cosmetics — no purchase involved, ever
• Drop-in plugin support if you want to wire up your own metric in ~20 lines of Python

Character Pack ($3+)

18 more characters to swap between. Purely cosmetic — buying it changes nothing about how the widget works, it's just more faces for it to wear. Unzip into the "characters" folder next to Perch.exe and it's picked up automatically.

Built-in data sources

System (CPU/memory/GPU/disk/battery/network), focus timer, countdown to a date, break reminder, today's git commits, and AI usage (reads a desktop assistant's local cache or a terminal tool's session logs — no network calls).

Notes

Windows only for now. Character art generated with a Stable Diffusion checkpoint under a license that permits commercial use of generated images. Independent hobby project, not affiliated with or endorsed by any tool it can optionally read usage data from.