Find answers to common questions about PingKit for iOS and PingKit Agent for Mac, or get in touch with our team.
Download PingKit Agent from the Mac App Store. After launching, it appears as an icon in your menu bar (top-right of your screen). Click the icon to open the dashboard. Grant Local Network permission when prompted so the Agent can discover devices on your network. The Agent runs in the background and syncs data to iCloud automatically.
Open PingKit Agent and click Upgrade in the toolbar, or subscribe in the iPhone app; either way the same tier unlocks on both through iCloud, as long as both are signed in to iCloud with the same Apple Account. You can choose between a monthly plan ($2.99 a month) or a yearly plan ($24.99 a year), the same price on iPhone and Mac. A 1-week free trial is available for new subscribers. Payment is charged to your Apple Account. On iOS, all 19 network tools are free, and on the Mac the Agent's device monitoring and network alerts are free too; Guardian adds the Agent's dashboard to the iPhone app through iCloud sync, and site-down and certificate alerts on the Mac.
Open the App Store on your Mac or iPhone, click your profile icon, then go to Account Settings → Subscriptions. Find PingKit Guardian and select Cancel Subscription. Your access continues until the end of the current billing period. Apple handles all billing - PingKit never stores payment information. If notifications are on, the device you started a free trial on reminds you two days before it ends, with the renewal date and price. PingKit also shows when a subscription bought on that device renews or, once renewal is off, when it ends: in Info on the iPhone and in Settings in PingKit Agent.
First, make sure both your iPhone and Mac are signed into the same Apple Account and that iCloud Drive is enabled. Your Mac's devices, alerts and history appear on your iPhone only with Guardian, so check that Guardian is active in Info on the iPhone. On your Mac, go to System Settings → Apple Account → iCloud → iCloud Drive and verify it is turned on. On your iPhone, go to Settings → Apple Account → iCloud → iCloud Drive. If data is still not syncing, try toggling iCloud Drive off and on, then relaunch both apps. Large initial syncs may take a few minutes on slow connections.
Certificate Monitor (one domain free, five with Guardian, 50 with Guardian Plus) checks the TLS certificates of the domains you add, on the device you add them on: PingKit Agent checks its list every hour while the Mac is awake, and the iPhone checks its own list when you open Cert Monitor. It warns you 30, 14, 7 and 1 days before a certificate expires, and again when it has expired, as long as that device has read the certificate in the last few hours; on iPhone the warning is a notification on every plan, and on a Mac it needs Guardian. Your iPhone and your Mac each keep their own list, so add a certificate on the device you want to watch it from.
Guardian Plus is a premium tier that adds to Guardian: Cert Monitor for up to 50 domains, alerts to a webhook, up to five Macs on your iPhone with 90 days of their history, four- and eight-hour Session Watch sessions on iPhone, ISO 27001 compliance PDF export, and scheduled and branded reports on iPhone. Uptime Watch, and Cert Monitor for up to 5 domains, are included in the base Guardian tier. Guardian Plus is available at $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year on iPhone and iPad, and $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year on Mac.
Very little. The 19 diagnostic tools run on your device; tools that look things up on the internet, such as the Security Scan's check of your own public address, contact the service they need. Uptime Watch and Cert Monitor keep the sites and domains you add on PingKit's alert service, and with Guardian the Mac Agent's data reaches your iPhone through your own iCloud account, which we cannot see. There are no user accounts, no third-party analytics SDKs and no advertising. The only usage measurement is anonymous aggregate counts of which features get reached, with no identifier attached.
Two things are worth stating precisely rather than rounding down to "no". AI answers are written on your own device where Apple Intelligence is available, or, with Guardian, by Apple Private Cloud Compute; when neither can, PingKit can send a summary of your network to its own service, and it asks your permission before that service ever receives anything. Device identification, part of Guardian, uses that same permission: when the on-device classifier cannot confidently name a device, it can ask that service for help, and the request carries what the device announces about itself or answers with, such as its hostname, maker, open ports and service announcements. You can withdraw the permission at any time, in Info on the iPhone or in Settings on the Mac. See our Privacy Policy for full details.
Make sure you have granted Local Network permission to PingKit Agent. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network and ensure PingKit Agent is enabled. If you are on a managed network (corporate or university), the network may block mDNS/Bonjour discovery and ARP scanning. Try on a home or personal network. Restarting the Agent can also help if permissions were changed after launch. If Local Network access is off, PingKit Agent says "Local Network access is off", and its Open System Settings button takes you to Privacy and Security, where you switch Local Network on. If only your router answers a scan, PingKit Agent tells you the Wi-Fi may be keeping devices apart, which is common on guest and hotel networks.
If you cannot find the answer to your question above, reach out and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
Email support@pingkit.appWe usually reply within a day or two.