What it is
Astro Gold is a native Cocoa Mac app developed by Esoteric Technologies, the Australian software house that also produces Solar Fire for Windows. The first Mac version shipped in 2013 as a port of the Solar Fire calculation engine to a fully native Apple Silicon and Intel binary, with a separate iOS app following in 2014. The engineering work is real. Astro Gold uses proper drag gestures, Mac-style menu bars, and a chart-wheel renderer with typographic care that Windows astrology programs rarely match. Esoteric Technologies ships major updates every 18 to 30 months, with point releases more often, and the codebase is actively maintained as of version 2 on macOS and version 4 on iOS.
Who uses it
Astro Gold's audience is the Mac-native working astrologer who refused to install Parallels for Solar Fire. The typical user is a practitioner with 3 to 10 clients a month, often based in Australia, the UK, or the United States, who values craft Mac UX more than the deepest classical research module. iOS Astro Gold has a second audience: astrologers running consultations on iPad with Apple Pencil annotation, particularly for traveling workshop teachers who need full offline read and write at retreat centers.
Headline features
- Native macOS Cocoa app with proper drag, gestures, Apple Silicon binary
- iOS sibling with Apple Pencil annotation on iPad
- Primary directions shipped (same engine as Solar Fire)
- Tertiary and minor progressions built in
- Swiss Ephemeris core, arc-second accuracy against DE431
- Esoteric Technologies vendor lineage, shared with Solar Fire 9.x
- Egyptian bound table only, no Hand/Schmidt modern set
Headline price and 5-year cost
The macOS license is $299 on the Mac App Store, single Apple ID. The iOS app is a separate $49.99 purchase. Major upgrades roll out roughly every 30 months at around $100 each. Realistic 5-year total for a Mac-and-iPad practitioner: $449 to $549.
Where Astrolium does it differently
Astro Gold and Astrolium overlap on the chart calculation surface: same Swiss Ephemeris core, near-identical positions across the standard house systems. The honest gap is on the client side. Astro Gold ships a charts database with categories and tags, which works for personal organization, but does not include intake forms, session notes attached to client profiles, shareable links the client opens in their browser, or Stripe invoicing. A working practitioner using Astro Gold for 4 client readings a week typically stitches together Notion or Airtable for the CRM, Calendly for scheduling, and Canva for the PDF deliverable.
The second difference is platform reach. Astro Gold is Apple-only by design. Astrolium runs in any modern browser on Mac, Windows, iPad, Linux, and Android, which matters for teaching teams where students arrive on whatever laptop they own.
For traditional researchers who use primary directions, Astro Gold remains the right tool alongside Astrolium — the team explicitly recommends running both in parallel rather than forcing the migration on that specific technique.
If you are moving from Astro Gold
The full walkthrough (calculation parity, .AG file migration, the cases where Astro Gold still wins) lives at Astro Gold vs Astrolium. Astro Gold's .AG files import to Astrolium in 1 drag, with categories mapping 1-to-1 to Astrolium tags. For Astrolium's pricing and the features hub, see the working surfaces directly.
Start the migration wizard for a 45 minute parallel session with the team.