What is Macroscope?
Macroscope reviews pull requests on GitHub. When a change is pushed it reads the diff with the surrounding code, posts comments on likely bugs and can fix a finding in a new pull request on request. Around the reviewer sit Status, which summarises every commit and sends a weekly report of what the team shipped; Approvability, an agent that can approve low-risk pull requests on its own; Check Run Agents, custom checks written in Markdown; a CLI and plugins for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode; and Murmur, a beta service that runs coding agents in cloud sandboxes.
There are no seat fees. Reviews cost $0.025 to $0.20 per kilobyte of diff depending on the mode, with a 10 KB minimum, drawn from a prepaid balance shared by the whole workspace. New workspaces get $100 of free usage. Macroscope was started by Kayvon Beykpour, a co-founder of Periscope, and launched publicly in September 2025 with $40 million raised. Release notes come out weekly; the latest, on 30 October 2026, added a stricter approval mode.
How much does Macroscope cost?
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Budget review | $0.025 per KB | 10 KB minimum, so $0.25 per review at least |
| Balanced review (default) | $0.05 per KB | $0.50 minimum per review |
| Precise review | $0.06 per KB | $0.60 minimum per review |
| Ultra review | $0.20 per KB | $2.00 minimum per review |
| Status | $0.05 per commit |
No seat fees; prepaid balance with $100 free for new workspaces and 1,000 free Agent credits a month. Code review per KB of diff: Budget $0.025, Balanced (default) $0.05, Precise $0.06, Ultra $0.20, with a 10 KB minimum per review ($0.25, $0.50, $0.60 and $2.00 respectively). Status $0.05 per commit. Agent credits $0.01 each (model cost plus 5%); Approvability $0.30 per run. Free for qualifying non-commercial open source.
Is Macroscope worth it?
Seat-priced review tools charge you for every developer, including the ones who open two pull requests a month. If your team is small, or most of your code now comes from agents, you end up paying for chairs nobody sits in.
Macroscope charges for the size of the change instead. In its default mode a review costs 5 cents per kilobyte of diff, so a small fix is 50 cents and a 30 KB change is $1.50; the company says its historical average is 95 cents. A team running 200 reviews a month would pay around $190 at that average, about what eight seats of CodeRabbit's $24 tier cost. You can drop to a Budget mode at half the price or pay four times as much for Ultra on the changes that matter.
It is also moving quickly. The release notes come out every week; in October alone they added an auto-approval dashboard, a preview mode that shows which pull requests it would have approved, and a rebuilt context-gathering step that Macroscope says is 14% faster and catches 5% more known bugs on its own benchmark.
The catch: every push is billed as a new review, and the 10 KB minimum applies each time. An agent that pushes eight small fixes to one pull request costs at least $4 on that pull request, not 50 cents. Defaults of $10 per review and $50 per pull request limit the damage, but Auto Refill is on out of the box and work already running finishes even if your balance is empty, so the overage lands on your invoice. Set a monthly limit on day one. Macroscope also works only with GitHub, so GitLab and Bitbucket teams are out.
On data, Macroscope says it holds SOC 2 Type II, does not train models on customer code, and has agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic that stop them training on it either. It does keep a copy of your code to work from, and its terms and privacy policy publish no retention period for source code.
Our take: Macroscope is the per-review meter, Greptile the per-credit one, CodeRabbit the per-seat one. For a five-person team on GitHub shipping agent-written code, the meter usually wins; for 50 developers who each open a few small pull requests a week, a seat licence is easier to budget.
Where it earns its place
A four-person startup shipping mostly Claude Code pull requests
Get every pull request checked without paying for seats
Install the GitHub app and switch on Correctness for each repo; the $100 welcome credit covers roughly 100 average reviews. Set a monthly limit and turn off Auto Refill in Settings, Billing, so a busy week cannot surprise you.
An engineering manager at a 60-person SaaS company
Stop senior engineers rubber-stamping small, safe pull requests
Turn on Approvability in Preview Mode first to see which pull requests it would approve, then switch to Strict mode for real approvals. Each agent run costs $0.30, and rules in .macroscope/approvability.md override its judgement.
A head of engineering reporting to a non-technical CEO
Explain each week what the team shipped without writing it up by hand
Status summarises every commit at $0.05 each and emails a weekly digest grouped by product area. A team landing 1,000 commits a month pays about $50; bot commits are billed unless their authors are excluded.
Before you commit
- Setup
- Sign in with GitHub, install the app on chosen repositories and activate billing; reviews start on the next push. Status needs about 60 minutes to process recent history. The CLI installs with one curl command and adds plugins to Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode.
- Integrations
- GitHub, including Enterprise Managed Users and IP allow lists; Slack for questions, alerts and ticket requests; MCP connectors for Approvability; webhooks, a beta REST API and S3 exports.
- Data and privacy
- SOC 2 Type II, with the report available on request through the trust centre. Macroscope says it does not train on customer code and its model providers are contractually barred from doing so. It stores code to work on it; personal data is deleted within 31 days of account deactivation, and no source-code retention period is published. Which AI tools train on your data?
- Cost at scale
- At the company's 95-cent average, 1,000 reviews a month is about $950 in Balanced mode or $475 in Budget mode, plus $0.05 per commit for Status. Annual contracts at discounted rates are available through sales.
- Limits
- GitHub only; the 10 KB minimum applies to every push; Check Run Agent caps are best effort, so parallel agents can overshoot the $100 per-pull-request default.
What’s good
- No seat fees; a typical review costs about 95 cents by Macroscope's figures
- Four modes from $0.025 to $0.20 per KB, switchable per repository or per pull request
- Per-review, per-pull-request and monthly spending caps
- Weekly releases, with auto-approval, custom Markdown checks and a CLI for coding agents
- SOC 2 Type II; no training on customer code
What’s not
- GitHub only
- Each push is a new review with its own 10 KB minimum
- Auto Refill on by default, and in-flight work can run past your balance
- Keeps a copy of your code with no published retention period
- No self-hosted option documented
Best for
Small and mid-sized GitHub teams, especially ones with a lot of agent-written code, who would rather pay per review than per seat.
Macroscope alternatives
Macroscope: common questions
- Is Macroscope worth it?
- Macroscope makes AI review cheap for a small GitHub team, as long as you set the spending caps before your agents start pushing ten times a pull request. We rate it 4.0 out of 5.
- How much does Macroscope cost?
- No seat fees; prepaid balance with $100 free for new workspaces and 1,000 free Agent credits a month. Code review per KB of diff: Budget $0.025, Balanced (default) $0.05, Precise $0.06, Ultra $0.20, with a 10 KB minimum per review ($0.25, $0.50, $0.60 and $2.00 respectively). Status $0.05 per commit. Agent credits $0.01 each (model cost plus 5%); Approvability $0.30 per run. Free for qualifying non-commercial open source.
- What are the downsides of Macroscope?
- GitHub only; each push is a new review with its own 10 KB minimum; auto Refill on by default, and in-flight work can run past your balance; keeps a copy of your code with no published retention period; no self-hosted option documented.
- Who is Macroscope best for?
- Small and mid-sized GitHub teams, especially ones with a lot of agent-written code, who would rather pay per review than per seat.
- How much does Macroscope cost for a team or in production?
- At the company's 95-cent average, 1,000 reviews a month is about $950 in Balanced mode or $475 in Budget mode, plus $0.05 per commit for Status. Annual contracts at discounted rates are available through sales.
- Is Macroscope safe for company data?
- SOC 2 Type II, with the report available on request through the trust centre. Macroscope says it does not train on customer code and its model providers are contractually barred from doing so. It stores code to work on it; personal data is deleted within 31 days of account deactivation, and no source-code retention period is published.
- What are the best Macroscope alternatives?
- The closest alternatives we have reviewed are Greptile, CodeRabbit, Qodo, GitHub Copilot and Cursor.
Answers checked Nov 2, 2026.