Free Text Expander for Mac - Type less.
Do more.

Yes, for text expansion. The expander is free with no subscription and no feature gates: unlimited snippets, unlimited collections, abbreviation expansion, keyboard shortcuts, the Spotlight-style launcher, rich text editing, Markdown expansion, dynamic tokens, iCloud Sync, JavaScript and AppleScript scripting, AI tokens with five provider options, and the multilingual interface across 8 languages.

Pro is $18 once and covers five features: unlimited clipboard clips, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, notes sync and note version history. The clipboard manager itself works free for your 10 most recent clips.

The cost comparison against paid alternatives is direct. TextExpander charges $40/year on a subscription. aText costs $4.99 but stopped getting updates in 2016.

Typinator is $24.99 as a one-time license. TypeFire's text expander is $0 forever, with an optional $18 one-time Pro tier, distributed through GitHub releases as a notarized macOS binary.

The project runs at near-zero cost because it has no cloud backend. Snippets stay on your Mac. iCloud Sync uses your own iCloud Drive.

AI features use your own API keys. Nothing routes through a TypeFire server.

Yes, three free options. First option: Apple Intelligence.

If you have macOS 26 Tahoe or later on Apple Silicon, Apple Intelligence runs on-device at zero cost. No API key, no usage limit, fully offline.

The model is smaller than the cloud ones but handles rewrite, summarize, and translate well for typical lengths. Second option: Gemini free tier.

Google offers a free tier on the Gemini API with generous daily quotas (currently 15 requests per minute and 1500 requests per day on the standard model). Sign up for an API key at ai.google.dev, paste it into TypeFire settings, done.

For light personal use this rarely hits the limit. Third option: local Ollama.

Install Ollama on your Mac (free, open source), pull an open-source model like Llama 3, Mistral, or Qwen, and point TypeFire's Custom provider at http://localhost:11434. Usage is unlimited, fully offline, nothing leaves your Mac.

The tradeoff is that the model runs on your CPU/GPU so quality and speed depend on your hardware. Most people start with Apple Intelligence if their Mac supports it, then add Gemini or Ollama for power use cases.

TypeFire is free. AI costs depend on which provider you pick.

Free providers. Apple Intelligence (on-device on macOS 26+), Gemini free tier, and local Ollama all cost zero.

These cover most personal use cases without spending anything. Paid providers.

Claude (Anthropic) and OpenAI charge per token. For typical TypeFire use cases rewriting paragraphssummarizing emailstranslating short text, a request costs somewhere between $0.001 and $0.01.

A heavy daily user might spend $1 to $3 per month. Both Claude and OpenAI let you set monthly spending caps on their dashboards, so there is no surprise bill risk.

TypeFire does not mark up AI usage or take any cut. The API key you paste in connects directly to the provider.

Your usage shows up on your provider's billing dashboard, not TypeFire's. The app itself never charges you, never sees your API responses, and has no way to monetize your AI usage even if it wanted to.

Dynamic tokens are placeholders that resolve to live values when a snippet expands.

Eight built-in tokens cover most needs. {{date}} inserts today's date. {{time}} inserts the current time. {{datetime}} inserts both. Each takes an optional format string like {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} or {{time:HH:mm}} for custom output. {{clipboard}} pastes whatever is currently on your clipboard. {{cursor}} positions the cursor at a specific spot within the expanded snippet, so you can type immediately at the right place. {{snippet:abbr}} nests one snippet inside another, useful for composable templates. {{key:tab}} or {{key:return}} simulates a key press, useful for filling form fields. {{nbsp}} inserts a non-breaking space.

Tokens turn static text into context-aware templates. A meeting note template might start with the date filled in, jump the cursor to the attendee list, and end with your sign-off. Without tokens, the same snippet would expand identically every time.

Yes. TypeFire has built-in iCloud Sync that keeps your snippet library in sync across every Mac signed into your Apple ID.

Turn it on once in Settings and your snippets, collections, and tags sync within seconds whenever you make a change. The sync uses your own iCloud Drive, not a TypeFire-operated server.

Sync runs through your own iCloud Drive, protected by your Apple account. TypeFire has no server in the path and never sees the contents of your snippets.

This is different from TextExpander, which routes snippet data through its own cloud infrastructure as part of its subscription service. iCloud Sync is free and unlimited. There is no per-snippet cap, no per-device cap, and no separate fee.

If you have three Macs at home plus a work laptop, all four stay in sync at no cost. The one limitation is that Sync is Mac to Mac today.

An iOS keyboard is in development, with no release date to announce yet. On iOS, text expansion has to run through a custom keyboard rather than system-wide, which is the approach that app takes.

TypeFire supports five distinct snippet content types, each with an editor tuned to that format.

Plain Text is the simplest. Just text, expanded character-for-character with no formatting.

Best for email addresses, short canned phrases, and code snippets where formatting would interfere. Rich Text uses the built-in TipTap editor and supports font family, size, color, highlighting, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, bullet lists, numbered lists, code blocks, images, and links.

Expands as rich text in any app that accepts formatted clipboard content. Markdown lets you write snippets in Markdown source format.

When the snippet expands, TypeFire converts the Markdown to HTML and pastes it as formatted text. The source file stays clean and readable in any text editor.

JavaScript snippets run JavaScript code when triggered and paste the return value. Useful for clipboard transformations, dynamic computation, or generating output that depends on context.

AppleScript snippets work the same way, running AppleScript and pasting the result. Used for macOS automation, controlling other apps, or pulling data from system services. Each content type can also use dynamic tokens like {{date}} and {{clipboard}}.

Yes. TypeFire ships with a full rich text editor built on TipTap, the same WYSIWYG framework used in modern apps like Notion.

The editor supports font family, font size, font color, text highlighting, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, bullet lists, numbered lists, code blocks, inline images, and hyperlinks. When you trigger a rich text snippet, TypeFire writes the formatted content to your clipboard as rich HTML and pastes it.

The result keeps its formatting in any app that accepts rich clipboard content. This works in Mail, Pages, Word, Slack messages, Notion pages, and most other modern apps.

Apps that only accept plain text (Terminal, vim) get the plain text version automatically. For developer-style workflows, TypeFire also supports Markdown snippets.

Write your snippet in Markdown source format and it expands as fully rendered HTML at paste time. The Markdown source stays in your snippet file, which makes diffing and version control easy if you keep your vault in git.

Yes. TypeFire treats variables as dynamic tokens (covered in detail in the dynamic tokens question above).

The practical way to think about variables: any data point that changes by context goes into a token, and TypeFire resolves it at paste time. Common patterns. {{date}} for daily logs and meeting notes. {{clipboard}} for snippets that wrap whatever you just copied (like a Markdown link wrapper, or a console.log of the clipboard content). {{cursor}} for jumping the caret to a fill-in-the-blank position. {{snippet:abbr}} for composing reusable building blocks (your signature inside your email template).

For more dynamic logic than tokens cover, JavaScript snippets give you full programming capability. You can read the clipboard, transform it, query system data, and paste a computed result.

AppleScript snippets do the same with deeper access to other Mac apps. The token system covers maybe 80 percent of cases. Script snippets cover the rest.

Yes. TypeFire works in every Mac app that accepts text input.

This includes native apps like Safari, Mail, Notes, Pages, and Numbers, plus Chromium-based browsers ChromeEdgeBraveArc, Electron apps VS CodeSlackDiscordNotionFigmaLinear, terminal emulators (Terminal, iTerm, Warp), Microsoft Office, JetBrains IDEs, and any other text-input surface. Why this works universally: macOS Accessibility APIs sit underneath the application layer, so they see keystrokes regardless of what framework the app is built on.

Apple's built-in text replacement feature, by contrast, only works in native Cocoa text fields and silently fails in everything else. Setup is a one-time grant of the Accessibility permission.

No per-app configuration, no extensions to install in browsers, no plugins for editors. The abbreviation you typed, the keyboard shortcut you bound, and the Spotlight-style launcher all work the moment you switch focus to any app.

TypeFire supports macOS 12 Monterey and every release since.

That covers macOS 13 Ventura, macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 15 Sequoia, and macOS 26 Tahoe. Each major macOS release gets tested before TypeFire ships.

TypeFire runs on macOS 12 Monterey and later. There is no bundled browser runtime, which keeps installs lean and startup fast.

Apple Intelligence features in TypeFire require macOS 26 Tahoe or later, since that is when Apple shipped the on-device foundation models. On older macOS versions, the rest of the AI provider integrations ClaudeOpenAIGeminiOllama work normally. Every other TypeFire feature works on all supported macOS versions.

TypeFire's interface is fully translated into 8 languages: English, Spanish (español), French (français), Portuguese Brazil (português brasileiro), German (Deutsch), Italian (italiano), Dutch (Nederlands), and Russian (русский).

Every UI surface is localized, not just menu labels. That includes the sidebar, the snippet editor, settings panels, the Spotlight-style launcher, onboarding flow, error messages, and notifications.

Roughly 800 strings per locale. To switch languages, open Settings, go to Appearance, and pick a language from the dropdown.

TypeFire restarts to apply the new language and remembers your choice across launches. On first launch, TypeFire defaults to your macOS system language if it matches one of the eight supported locales.

Snippet content itself can be any language and any script CyrillicCJKRTLemoji. The localization is for the app interface specifically. If you write Russian snippets while running TypeFire in English, both work fine together.

Yes. TypeFire has AI tokens you drop into any snippet.

The built-in tokens are {{ai:rewrite}}, {{ai:summarize}}, {{ai:translate:fr}} (or any language code), {{ai:fix}} for grammar, and {{ai:custom:your-prompt}} for arbitrary prompts. Drop one of these into a snippet, bind the snippet to a shortcut, and the AI runs against your current text selection or clipboard contents.

Five AI provider integrations are supported. Apple Intelligence runs on-device on macOS 26 Tahoe or later, costs nothing, and works fully offline.

Claude (Anthropic), OpenAI (ChatGPT), and Gemini (Google) use your own API keys for cloud-based requests. The Custom provider option accepts any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, which covers local model servers like Ollama and LM Studio, plus hosted gateways like Groq, OpenRouter, and Together.

A typical example. Highlight a paragraph you wrote, press your shortcut, and the AI rewrites it.

Or copy a long thread, type {{ai:summarize}}, and a TL;DR pastes back. Whatever the result is, it lands directly in the app you were typing in, no copy-paste back and forth.

The biggest difference is the pricing model. TextExpander costs $40 per year on a subscription that automatically renews.

TypeFire is free forever with no subscription. For an individual user that adds up to roughly $400 in TextExpander fees over a decade for the same core feature set.

Beyond cost, the technical differences favor TypeFire on a Mac specifically. TypeFire is a native macOS app built with Swift and Rust, which compiles to a small native binary.

TextExpander is built on Electron and runs a bundled Chromium runtime, so it uses more memory and CPU than a comparable native app. TypeFire also stores snippets as plain Markdown files in a folder you choose, so there is no vendor lock-in.

TextExpander stores in its proprietary cloud database. Feature-wise, both handle abbreviation expansion and global shortcuts well.

TypeFire adds Markdown expansion (write in Markdown, expand as formatted HTML), AI tokens with five provider integrations, JavaScript and AppleScript scripting, and a Spotlight-style launcher. TextExpander's main advantage is team collaboration features for workplaces, which TypeFire does not offer.

Yes. TypeFire is built around a privacy-first design.

Snippet content stays on your Mac as plain Markdown files in a folder you choose. The app never reads, transmits, or stores your snippet contents on any server.

Keystroke monitoring happens entirely on your device through the macOS Accessibility API. TypeFire sees the characters you type to detect abbreviations, but those keystrokes are processed in memory and discarded immediately.

They are never logged, transmitted, or persisted. The Accessibility permission is the only system permission TypeFire requests.

No Input Monitoring permission is required. Telemetry is anonymous.

Anonymous counts of active installs and expansion totals, without identifying individual users. No Mixpanel, no third-party tracking pixels, no personal data of any kind.

The one piece of personal info we do touch is your email, which you provide during signup to verify the install. Email is stored in a Google Sheet for usage tracking and is never shared. iCloud Sync, when enabled, routes through your own iCloud Drive.

Sync runs through your own iCloud Drive, protected by your Apple account. TypeFire has no server in the path and never sees your snippets.