Questions & answers

A widget dashboard for Windows. You arrange widgets (clocks, hardware monitors, weather, markets, news, match scores, audio visualizers, small games) onto a grid, and that grid becomes a screen you can glance at. Up to three pages, each with its own layout.

Any widget can also be popped out into its own small window and scattered across your desktop, pinned above other apps or parked on a second monitor.

$3.99 on Steam during Early Access. One payment, permanently. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads, no account to create, and no feature tiers. All 57 built-in widgets are included with the app.

Community widgets on the Steam Workshop are free.

64-bit Windows 10 or Windows 11. Widgey also uses Microsoft's WebView2 runtime, which is built into Windows 11 and already on most Windows 10 machines. If it is missing, Windows installs it on demand.

Hardware temperature monitoring is optional and needs a small background service you can install from inside the app. Everything else works without it.

Widgey is a native Windows application, not a packaged web browser, and it idles when nothing needs redrawing. Widgets update on their own schedules. A clock ticks once a second, a news feed every few minutes, so a dashboard full of static readouts costs very little.

The honest caveat: animated widgets like the audio visualizers and the digital rain effect do real work while they're on screen. If you're chasing every last frame, put those on a page you are not looking at, or close the dashboard to the tray while you play. Widgets on hidden pages aren't rendering.

No. Widgey runs perfectly well without Steam, and that is deliberate. It can start with Windows, and making it wait for a game client to boot before your clock appears would be a bad trade.

Steam is only needed for the Workshop: browsing, installing, updating and publishing community widgets. If Steam starts up after Widgey has already launched, Widgey notices within a couple of minutes and your Workshop widgets show up on their own. No restart needed.

No. On a single screen, most people either pin the dashboard to the desktop so it sits behind their windows, or bring it up with a keyboard shortcut when they want it and dismiss it again.

A second monitor is a nice place to park it, not a requirement.

Yes. It is tied to your Steam account rather than a machine, so you can install it anywhere you can sign in to Steam. Your layout is stored per-machine, so each PC can have its own arrangement.

One person. I started it because I wanted a better version of what iCUE was giving me: a second screen that stayed useful while I was playing something, showing latency, volume and what was actually eating my CPU.

It has been months of evenings at this point. That is also why Early Access is honest rather than a marketing label. I am still adding to it.

It means I'm still building it. The app is stable and all 57 widgets are finished and working, but there's more coming, mostly around community widgets and the Workshop.

The price goes up as it grows. Buy it now and every update is included. There's no separate "full version" waiting to be sold to you later.

Steam handles refunds, not me. The usual policy applies: within 14 days of purchase and under 2 hours of use, requested through Steam directly.

The grid goes up to 8 columns by 4 rows per page, across three pages. Widgets occupy anywhere from one cell to a large block, and each one carries its own minimum and maximum size so it can't be squashed into a shape it can't render.

Yes. One shortcut strips every header at once, leaving a clean wall of data. Widgets that show a live readout keep it visible in the body, so hiding headers doesn't hide your numbers.

Yes. "Pin to desktop" parents the dashboard to the desktop itself, so it lives behind everything else like a wallpaper layer. The opposite works too: pop-out windows can be pinned always-on-top individually.

Yes, there's a "Start with Windows" toggle in settings. It launches Widgey directly, so it doesn't wait on Steam or anything else, and any pop-out windows you left open are restored where you left them.

In %APPDATA%\WidgetDashboard\. That folder holds your layout, appearance settings, each widget's own saved settings, and any widgets you've sideloaded. Backing it up backs up your whole configuration.

Through Steam, like any other game or app you own. There's one wrinkle worth knowing about.

Steam won't update something while it's running, and Widgey is built to run all day and to start with Windows. If it's always open, Steam never gets a quiet moment to install anything, and the update just sits in the queue.

So Widgey checks on startup whether a newer version has been released, and if there is one it shows a banner with a Restart and update button. That closes Widgey, lets Steam install the update, and starts it again. Takes a few seconds.

If you'd rather not, dismiss the banner and it won't ask again for that version. You can always update the usual way instead: close Widgey and hit Update in your Steam library.

Reading CPU and GPU temperatures, fan speeds and power draw requires low-level hardware access that Windows only grants to privileged processes. Rather than run the whole app as administrator, Widgey uses a small background service that does only that job and hands the numbers back over a local channel.

It is a one-time administrator prompt to install, and entirely optional. Everything except hardware sensor readings works without it.

CPU package temperature and load, per-core clocks and power draw, GPU core and hotspot temperatures, GPU load, VRAM usage, GPU fan speed, motherboard and storage temperatures, RAM usage, and network throughput.

Which of these show up depends on your hardware and what its sensors expose. Some motherboards and laptops report far less than a desktop with a discrete GPU.

Yes. There is an uninstall button next to the install button, in Settings → Hardware Monitoring. It stops the service, removes it from Windows, and deletes its files.

It starts with Windows and idles in the background, polling sensors at a low rate. It does no network access of any kind. It only reads hardware and answers requests from Widgey on the same machine.

Widgets built by other people and shared through the Steam Workshop, free to install. They're web pages — HTML, CSS and JavaScript — running inside Widgey. Anyone who can build a small web page can build one.

Every community widget runs inside its own sandboxed browser container. It has no access to your files, cannot run programs, cannot see other widgets' data, and has no network access at all unless it names the exact hosts it needs, which you can read before installing.

Widgets are also validated on your own machine every time they load, not only when they were published, so a widget can't pass review and then misbehave later. Executables of any kind are rejected outright.

And there's a kill switch: if a widget is found to be doing something it shouldn't, it can be blocked from loading on every installation, without waiting on a Workshop takedown.

Only what it asks for, and you see the list before installing:

System reads hardware sensor values. Audio reads the 64-band spectrum of whatever is playing. Network makes requests to specific named hosts, and nothing else.

A widget that requests none of these gets a Sandboxed badge, and you can filter the Workshop to show only those.

Yes. Drop the folder into %APPDATA%\WidgetDashboard\UserWidgets\ and it appears in the catalog. Sideloaded widgets run under exactly the same sandbox and the same validation as Workshop ones. The only difference is that Widgey asks you to confirm the first time, since nobody else has vetted it.

Yes, and it is meant to be easy. A widget is a folder with an HTML file and a manifest. No SDK, no build step, no compiler. The app will scaffold a working one for you from Settings → Layout → + Create, and edits hot-reload as you save.

The Widget Creation Guide covers the manifest, the bridge API for sensors and audio, the permission model, and how to publish.

None. There's no analytics, no telemetry, no account, and no profile. Your layout, settings and sensor readings never leave your machine.

Four things reach the network, and nothing else:

Widgets you have chosen that need data, like weather, markets, news and scores. Each one talks only to its own source.

Steam, for Workshop browsing and downloads, when Steam is running.

A blocklist check on startup: Widgey downloads a small file listing any community widgets found to be harmful, so they stop loading.

A version check on startup: Widgey downloads a small file saying which version is current, so it can tell you when there's an update. Steam can't update Widgey while it's running, so without this an always-on dashboard can sit on an old build for a long time without knowing.

The last two are plain downloads. Widgey sends nothing about you, your machine or what you have installed, and there's no identifier attached. Like any web request, our server sees the connection itself, including your IP address, and that's the whole of it.

Workshop widgets are read through Steam. If Widgey started before Steam finished loading, which happens often when it launches with Windows, they cannot be found yet. Widgey keeps retrying for a couple of minutes and they'll appear on their own.

If they still don't, confirm Steam is running and signed in, then restart Widgey.

Check Settings → Hardware Monitoring. If the service is not installed, install it there. It needs one administrator prompt. If it says installed but not running, the same panel has a Start button.

If the service is running and specific values are still blank, your hardware likely doesn't expose those particular sensors. This is especially common on laptops.

This was caused by the sensor service running from inside Steam's own folder, and is fixed in current versions. The service now installs to Program Files, out of Steam's way.

If you hit it on an older build: reinstall the sensor service once from Settings → Hardware Monitoring after updating, and it won't recur.

Open Settings → Layout and look for the rejected widgets notice. Widgey lists anything it refused to load and the specific reason, which is usually a manifest problem in the widget itself rather than anything on your end.

If it loads but renders blank, that's a bug in the widget. Its Workshop page is the place to report it.

Verify the install through Steam first: right-click Widgey → Properties → Installed Files → Verify integrity. That resolves most cases.

If it launched before and stopped after a configuration change, rename %APPDATA%\WidgetDashboard\ to something else and start it again. You will get a fresh default layout, and can copy pieces back from the old folder.