Your tickers in the menu bar. No API key, no account.
Follow the stocks and ETFs you care about and see the day’s change against the previous close, coloured green or red. Star the important ones to pin them on top, search by company name or symbol, and get on with your day — nothing to sign up for.
Already have Toolbox? Open this widget
Add a symbol. That’s the setup.
Type a symbol — or a company name, and let the search find it — and it joins your list. Each row shows the last price and the change for the day against the previous close, green if up and red if down. Star the ones that matter and they pin to the top, above everything else, which is what keeps a twenty-symbol list usable.
While the popover is open it refreshes every 60 seconds, and there is a manual refresh if you want it now. Closed, it makes no requests at all — a widget you are not looking at has no business using your battery or someone else’s bandwidth. Your list and your favorites live on the machine; there is no account and nothing is synced to us.
- Search by company name or by symbol
- Stocks and ETFs; add and remove any time
- Favorites ⭐ pin to the top of the list
- 60-second refresh while open, plus manual refresh
- Also available to an agent, read-only, via the MCP server
Most ticker widgets ask you to go get a token first.
The usual flow for a free stock widget is: install it, discover it does nothing, find out you need to register for an API provider, create an account, copy a key, paste it in, and then find out the free tier is fifty calls a day. That is a lot of steps between you and a number.
So the default source needs no key at all: you get prices, the real change against the previous close, and name search out of the box. The requests are made by the app’s native core rather than by the widget in a browser context, which is what makes that possible without CORS workarounds, and quotes are fetched per symbol in parallel so a long list still fills in quickly. If you prefer your own provider, there is an optional Finnhub mode: paste your token into the settings and it switches over.
An honest note on sources. This widget originally used a different free provider and had to change: that one put an anti-bot JavaScript wall in front of its data, making it unusable from any plain HTTP client. Free financial data is free at someone else’s discretion, so if the numbers ever stop arriving, that is usually why — and the Finnhub option is the escape hatch.
- Default source: no key, no account, no rate-limit sign-up
- Optional Finnhub mode with your own token, stored locally
- Requests made natively — no CORS proxy in the middle
- Symbols fetched in parallel, so long lists fill fast
A glance, not a trading terminal.
macOS has a Stocks app, brokers have their own apps, and there are dedicated menu-bar tickers — several of them paid or subscription-based. They mostly do more than this: intraday charts, portfolio positions, profit and loss, alerts, news feeds, after-hours pricing.
This is the small end of that on purpose. It answers “where is it today?” for a handful of symbols, in the same popover as your other widgets, on both macOS and Windows, for free, with no key. It holds no positions, computes no returns, and gives no advice — and the data is a free feed that may lag by minutes. If you are making decisions with money, use your broker.
- Free, no account, no key, no subscription
- Same widget on macOS and Windows
- Where it stops: charts, portfolios, P&L, alerts, news
- Delayed data, stated in the widget — not for trading
Installed from the catalog, in one click.
Stocks isn’t bundled into the app — it’s a widget in the Webstarted Toolbox catalog. Download Toolbox, open the catalog tab (🧰), press the “+” next to Stocks, and it lands in your Finance tab, next to crypto and currencies. Here are a few of its neighbors:
Questions, answered.
Do I need an API key or an account?
No. Out of the box it uses Yahoo Finance, which needs neither: you get the price, the change against the previous close, and search by company name or symbol without signing up for anything. If you would rather use your own data source, there is an optional Finnhub mode — paste your token into the settings and it switches over. That is a choice, not a requirement, and the token is stored locally.
Is the change shown against the previous close or against today’s open?
Against the previous close, which is the number every finance site quotes and the one people mean by “the stock is down 2% today”. It matters because change-versus-open hides the overnight gap: a stock that closed at 100, opened at 94 and now sits at 95 is up versus the open and down 5% versus the close. The second number is the one you actually want.
How often does it refresh?
Every 60 seconds while the popover is open, plus a manual refresh button. It deliberately does not poll while the popover is closed — a widget you are not looking at should not be making network requests, draining battery or hammering someone’s endpoint. Open it and it is current.
Is the data real-time?
No, and you should not treat it as such. It comes from an external free source and may be delayed — typically by minutes, depending on the exchange. This widget is for glancing at a handful of tickers you care about, not for trading decisions. It says so in the widget itself, under the list: information only, not financial advice.
Can I follow ETFs and non-US listings?
Yes. Anything the underlying source can quote by symbol works, which covers ETFs and most major exchanges — for a non-US listing you generally need the exchange suffix the source expects. The search box helps: type a company name and it offers matching symbols so you can add the right one instead of guessing.
Can I pin the ones I care about?
Yes — star any ticker and it moves to the top of the list, ahead of everything else. Handy when you are following twenty symbols but three of them are the ones you actually check. You can remove any ticker at any time; the list and your favorites are stored locally on the machine.
Is it free?
Yes. Webstarted Toolbox is free and needs no account, and Stocks is a free widget in its catalog — one click from inside the app installs it, with no app update needed.
Get Webstarted Toolbox
Free to use. Download the app, then add Stocks from the catalog in one click. macOS 12+ and Windows 10+.
Market data comes from external providers and may be delayed. Nothing here or in the widget is investment, financial or trading advice, and none of it is a recommendation to buy or sell any security.
One icon, many small tools
This is just one of the widgets in Webstarted Toolbox. Here are the rest: