Free AI Text Expander for Mac in 2026 (Bring Your Own API Key)

Most text expanders that added AI in 2026 wrapped it in a subscription. TextExpander rolled out AI features behind their paid plan. Lightning Assist charges $5.99 per month. Raycast Pro charges $8 per month for AI commands. Magical and Text Blaze do the same dance.

TypeFire takes the other route. The app is free, the AI is bring-your-own-API-key, and the cheapest provider has a free tier that covers thousands of typical requests per day. Total ongoing cost for the AI features: zero, in a lot of realistic personal-use scenarios.

This post explains what AI tokens actually do in TypeFire, how the math works on running them for free, and the two ways you trigger them.

What an AI token is

In TypeFire, every snippet body can contain tokens that resolve at expansion time. The classic ones are dates and clipboards: {{date}} becomes today's date, {{clipboard}} becomes whatever you last copied. AI tokens follow the same shape but route through a language model instead of a built-in formatter.

The format is {{ai:action}} or {{ai:action:modifier}}. A few concrete ones:

• {{ai:rewrite}} polishes a draft. Fixes grammar, tightens phrasing, keeps your meaning.
• {{ai:rewrite:professional}} does the same in a more formal tone.
• {{ai:summarize:bullets}} turns long text into bullet points.
• {{ai:translate:fr}} translates to French. Replace fr with any language code or name.
• {{ai:fix}} fixes only spelling and grammar without rewording.
• {{ai:custom:turn this into a Slack-style update}} runs anything you write after the second colon as a custom instruction.

The AI runs at the moment the snippet expands. Whatever it returns gets pasted into your active app. No window switches, no copy-paste loop.

How you actually use it

Two paths, both quiet. No popups, no modals.

Selection plus keyboard shortcut. You highlight some text in any app, press a global hotkey bound to your AI snippet, and the rewritten text replaces what you had selected. Works in Mail, Slack, Notes, Cursor, ChatGPT, Chrome, anywhere on macOS.

Clipboard plus abbreviation. You copy text first, then type the abbreviation in any text field. The AI runs on what you copied and pastes the result wherever your cursor is.

If neither path is set up (no selection, no clipboard, no preceding text in the snippet body), TypeFire pastes a small reminder telling you what to do. You re-fire the snippet once you have input ready.

How to keep it free

Three providers are supported: Claude (Anthropic), OpenAI (ChatGPT), and Gemini (Google). The first two require prepaid credits to use the API at all. Gemini has a real free tier with daily quotas that are generous for personal use.

Practical recipe for $0 running cost:

1. Sign up at aistudio.google.com (free, Google account).
2. Open aistudio.google.com/apikey, click Create API key, and pick a project that does not have billing enabled. The default new project is exactly this.
3. Open TypeFire, go to Settings, AI tab. Paste your key in the Gemini field. Click Test. The dot turns green.
4. Set Active Provider to Gemini.
5. In the model picker, leave it at Gemini 2.5 Flash. Flash has the highest free quota of any current Gemini model.

You now have an AI text expander running for free. The free tier covers somewhere in the range of 1,500 requests per day depending on the model, which is more than most individuals will burn through.

If you want Claude or OpenAI later, the math is still small. Sonnet costs roughly half a cent per typical AI rewrite. $5 of credits buys you about a thousand expansions. There is no TypeFire markup; the cost passes through to whichever provider you picked.

Privacy

Your API key sits in TypeFire's local config file, on your Mac. AI requests go directly from your Mac to whichever provider you picked. TypeFire's servers see none of it. No proxy, no logging, no analytics on the AI traffic. The only telemetry the app does is anonymous Aptabase for usage counts (no content), which is also documented in the privacy policy.

When TypeFire's AI tokens are the right tool

You want them when you write or rewrite a lot, in many different apps, and you want the keyboard to do the work. Specifically:

• Polishing rough drafts in Slack and Mail before sending.
• Translating short messages between languages on the fly.
• Generating support replies from a customer's email.
• Summarizing long documents into bullets without leaving the doc.
• Cleaning up grammar in any text field, anywhere.

You probably do not want them when you need a back-and-forth conversation with the AI. For that, the official Claude or ChatGPT desktop apps are the right tool. AI tokens are for one-shot transformations of text that already exists.

How to start in two minutes

1. Download TypeFire from typefire.app. It is signed and notarized; no scary install warnings.
2. On first launch, verify your email (one-time code).
3. Open Settings, go to the AI tab, paste a Gemini key (free tier, 60 seconds to obtain).
4. Create a new snippet. Body: {{ai:rewrite:professional}}. Abbreviation: zrw.
5. Copy any rough draft text on your Mac. Type zrw<space> in any text field. The polished version pastes.

That is the whole loop. Free AI text expander, zero markup, three providers, two trigger paths.