---
title: "Notifications"
description: "What antiburn notifies you about, the usage-milestone thresholds, and how Focus and Do Not Disturb are respected."
url: "https://antiburn.ai/docs/app/notifications/"
---
## What antiburn notifies you about

antiburn posts notifications in its own small window for exactly these things, and nothing else — there's no digest, no progress notification, and no marketing:

- a newer version is available (when automatic updates are on)
- the first scan failure of a run
- free disk space dropping below your threshold (macOS)
- a usage milestone (see below)
- the first-run menu-bar location pointer
- the test notification you triggered from Settings

Turn notifications off entirely with the master switch in **Settings → Notifications → Notify me**. Everything below except the test button and the first-run pointer depends on it.

## Usage milestones

Milestone notifications need plan-limit readings that keep moving, so they only fire while **Settings → Usage** is set to keep refreshing your provider usage. Turn that off and milestones go quiet, because there's nothing new to report.

By default, antiburn notifies at every 10% of a limit, comparing quota used against time elapsed in that limit's window. Settings → Notifications lets you choose any 5% step instead, separately for five-hour and weekly milestones, with select-all and clear-all controls. Every successful live reading checks for a crossing, and the background monitor checks at most every five minutes. If usage jumps between readings, the notification names both the milestone that was crossed and the provider's current percentage.

## Suppressed, not queued

A notification suppressed by Focus, Do Not Disturb, or a disk-space episode that hasn't recovered yet is **dropped, not saved for later** — turning Focus off never releases a backlog of stale alerts. For a usage milestone specifically, that just means the crossing stays recorded as delivered; the next milestone still notifies normally.

## Focus and Do Not Disturb

Immediately before showing an automated notification, antiburn asks the operating system whether interruptions are currently welcome:

- **macOS** — Focus and Do Not Disturb (needs a one-time permission prompt; antiburn asks after setup completes, and only reads whether Focus is on)
- **Windows** — fullscreen and presentation states
- **GNOME** — its Do Not Disturb setting
- **KDE Plasma** — its Do Not Disturb setting

If the operating system can't say either way — permission denied, a missing service, an API failure — antiburn delivers the notification rather than staying silent. Turn "Respect Do Not Disturb" off in Settings → Notifications if you'd rather it never checks.

The test notification and the first-run menu-bar pointer always show, Focus or no Focus, because they're the direct result of a button you just pressed.

## Other settings

- **Sound** — a short chime antiburn generates itself, played only for the test notification; other notifications stay quiet.
- **Auto-dismiss time** — how long a notification stays on screen before it fades (3–30 seconds); hovering pauses the timer.
- **Position** (macOS) — hanging under the antiburn menu-bar icon, or the screen's top-right corner.
- **Remaining disk space** (macOS) — show free space next to the icon always, only when low, or never; choose the threshold that counts as low (25/50/100GB); and a separate toggle for whether crossing that threshold notifies you. It fires once when space drops below the level, and again only after it recovers.

Everything a notification says is built on your machine, and nothing about it leaves the machine.