Alin Panaitiu

Alin Panaitiu is an independent macOS developer living in Brașov, Romania. He is best known for Lunar, an app that brings adaptive brightness to external monitors by talking to them over the DDC protocol, adjusting brightness and contrast from ambient light, location, sensors or hotkeys, and also controlling volume, input switching and power.

He also makes Clop, which watches the clipboard and folders and automatically optimizes images, videos and PDFs, and runs The Low-Tech Guys, a small app studio with two friends focused on single-purpose Mac and web apps such as rcmd, Pipiri and Crank. Earlier he built Noiseblend, a Spotify music discovery web app.

Panaitiu left his corporate job around 2022 to live off his apps; a 2023 profile reported that his Mac apps were earning roughly $3,500 to $9,000 a month. He open-sources much of his work on GitHub and, away from the keyboard, carves wooden cups and spoons for his own web shop.