Anyone who deploys projects to Vercel knows the familiar dance of refreshing the dashboard to check if your deployment has finished building or if something went wrong. I recently discovered an open-source solution that puts this information right in your menu bar where you can monitor it at a glance.
Vercel Deployment Menu Bar is a lightweight native Swift app that polls the Vercel API and displays real-time deployment status. The menu bar icon updates based on your latest deployment state - build, ready, or error - so you can see the status without opening a browser tab. Click the icon and you get a dropdown showing deployment details, with quick access to jump to the full deployment information.
In my testing on an M2 MacBook Air, the app sits quietly in the menu bar using roughly 100MB of memory and minimal CPU. Setup requires a Vercel API token, which you can generate from your account settings. If you’re monitoring a team account, you’ll also need to provide the Team ID, which you can find in your Vercel dashboard URL. The app handles both personal and team-scoped tokens.
The developer has done the work to properly code-sign and notarize the app, so you won’t see any Gatekeeper warnings when you download the pre-built binary from the GitHub releases page. That’s a detail I appreciate - too many open-source Mac apps skip this step and create friction for users. Alternatively, you can build from source if you’re comfortable with Xcode and Swift.
The app requires macOS 13.0 or later and integrates cleanly into the system. It’s particularly useful if you’re frequently shipping changes or running a CI/CD workflow where you need to know immediately when deployments finish or encounter problems. The upside-down triangle icon (a flipped Vercel logo) is a nice touch that makes it recognizable without being intrusive.
For developers working with Vercel deployments regularly, this fills a specific need without adding bloat. The source code is available under an MIT license on GitHub, and the project welcomes contributions.
