A ClipBook alternative
with a free tier
Is there a ClipBook alternative with a free tier?
ClipBook has no free tier. TypeFire is free to start and keeps your 10 most recent clips with every feature available, including on device OCR and AI actions on a clip.
Pro removes the limit and adds Selection Prompts for $18 once, on three Macs, not a subscription.
Why people move from ClipBook
The specific reasons people give for switching.
There is no free tier to fall back to
ClipBook is paid from the first launch: $9.99 for one Mac, $14.99 for two, $29.99 for five. TypeFire's clipboard manager works permanently free at your 10 most recent clips, and the text expander is uncapped free forever.
Per-device pricing adds up
ClipBook licenses are counted per Mac, so a laptop and a desktop is $14.99. TypeFire's $18 license covers up to three of your own Macs, restored by email.
It is a clipboard manager and nothing else
ClipBook does one job well. If you also want text expansion you are running a second app with a second set of permissions and a second thing to keep updated.
No AI anywhere
ClipBook has no AI features. TypeFire can summarize, rewrite, or translate any clip, using Apple Intelligence or a local model on your Mac, or your own API key. That is on the free tier.
Nothing you copy can become permanent
In ClipBook, a clip is a clip. When you notice you have copied the same paragraph for the fourth time, there is nothing to promote it to. TypeFire turns it into a snippet with an abbreviation.
Guides instead of an app that explains itself
ClipBook leans on 77 help pages. That is a lot of documentation for a clipboard manager, and a reasonable signal about how much you will need it.
TypeFire compared with ClipBook
Prices and capabilities as of September 2026.
| TypeFire | ClipBook | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes, 10 recent clips, permanent | No free tier at all |
| Entry price | $0, then $18 once for unlimited | $9.99 for one Mac |
| Two Macs | $18 total, up to 3 Macs | $14.99 |
| Text expander included | Yes, unlimited, free | No, clipboard only |
| Save a clip as a reusable snippet | Yes, with an abbreviation | No |
| OCR search inside images | Yes, on-device, free tier | Yes |
| AI actions on clips | Yes, free tier | No |
| AI text rewriting in any app | Yes, Selection Prompts on Pro | No |
| No third-party server | Yes, encrypted DB, sync via your iCloud | Yes |
| Open source | No | Yes, source is public |
| Source-app filtering | Yes | Yes |
| Chrome extension for web apps | Yes, free | No |
ClipBook pricing from clipbook.app/pricing, August 2026. Both apps store clips locally and neither syncs your clipboard to a server.
What ClipBook does better
Three of them, named plainly, with what TypeFire does instead directly below.
It is open source
ClipBook's source is public, so you can audit exactly what it does with your clipboard rather than taking a privacy claim on trust. TypeFire answers the same question differently: the clipboard database is encrypted on your Mac with a key held in the Keychain, nothing is uploaded, and sync between your own Macs runs through your iCloud rather than our servers.
Deeper clipboard-specific features
ClipBook has spent its entire development on one job, and it shows in the details: copy-and-merge, splitting a text item, formatting text before pasting, per-display window positions. TypeFire covers the common ground but not every one of those corners.
Homebrew installation
brew install --cask clipbook, which matters if you manage your Mac setup as code. TypeFire ships as a signed and notarized DMG with in-app updates.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in ClipBook at any price.
The clip-to-snippet loop
Right-click any clip, choose Save as snippet, give it an abbreviation. The thing you copied once becomes three characters you type forever. ClipBook has no snippet engine, so this is not something it can add without becoming a different product.
A full text expander, free
Unlimited snippets, abbreviations that expand in every Mac app and every website, collections, tags, dynamic tokens for dates and clipboard contents, rich text, Markdown, and script snippets in JavaScript and AppleScript.
AI where you are already typing
Highlight text anywhere, trigger a prompt by its abbreviation or its own shortcut, and rewrite, fix, translate or summarize it in place. Chain several passes onto one hotkey. Runs on Apple Intelligence or a local model, so it can be genuinely on-device.
One app, one permission
A clipboard manager plus a text expander normally means two apps, two Accessibility grants, two update cycles, and two menu bar icons. This is one of each.
A Chrome extension for everything else
Your snippets follow you into every web app, on any operating system, including Windows and ChromeOS. Free, with no paid tier.
Markdown Quick Look
Select any .md file in Finder, press Space, and read it rendered instead of raw source. Small, free, and surprisingly hard to live without once you have it.
Turn anything you copy into something you type
Right-click a clip, choose Save as snippet, give it an abbreviation. The thing you copied once becomes something you type three characters to get, forever. The same conversions run across all three surfaces: a clip becomes a note, and a note you keep rewriting becomes a snippet. Snippets, clips and notes live in one app, which is what makes each of those a single click rather than an export and an import.
- 01
Copy something
It lands in Clips alongside everything else you copied today.
- 02
Save as snippet
It leaves your rolling history and enters your permanent library.
- 03
Give it a trigger
Type
invfrom then on and never look it up again.
A clipboard manager you can tell what to ignore
A clipboard manager sees everything you copy. Until 4.0 the only control over that was a password-manager exclusion you could not see. There are three now, none of them gated, and the limits of the strongest one are stated rather than buried.
Turn image capture off
One switch. Text keeps being captured and pictures stop. Images you have already saved are kept rather than deleted, which is not what most people expect a privacy toggle to do, so it is worth saying.
Name apps to skip
Add any application and TypeFire ignores what you copy in it. Choose from the apps it has already seen, with clip counts, or browse to any app on your Mac. Each app gets one of three settings: allow it, block images only, or block everything you copy there. The middle one is what most people want for a work tool, keeping the text and losing the screenshots.
The password managers, now visible
TypeFire has always ignored password managers. That list is in Settings now, twenty-three apps including 1Password, Bitwarden, KeePassXC, Dashlane and Apple Passwords, blocked by bundle ID in code rather than by a setting you have to find. It shows which of them you have installed, and any one can be overridden.
Encrypted on your Mac
Clips are stored in an encrypted database on your Mac. The key is generated on your machine and kept in the macOS Keychain. Images sit beside it, readable only by your own account.
Secrets expire in minutes
Card numbers and high-entropy strings are detected and deleted after five minutes by default, adjustable in Settings. Everything else follows the retention you choose.
An on-device AI option
Apple Intelligence and local models through Ollama or LM Studio run entirely on your machine. If you pick Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini instead, text goes to that provider directly; TypeFire operates no server in that path.
Where blocking by app stops being a guarantee
macOS does not tell an application which other application wrote to the clipboard. TypeFire matches on the app that was in front at the time, plus any app that identifies itself using the standard convention. That covers the overwhelming majority of real cases and it is not absolute. The protection that does not depend on a guess is the concealed-content marker: password managers mark what they copy, and TypeFire never stores it whatever else is set.
The app list also covers what you copy, not screenshots you save as a file. A PNG on your desktop records nothing about what was on screen, so TypeFire matches those to an app where it can and skips them when it does. It is right in the ordinary case and it is not a promise: to keep saved screenshots out entirely, turn off Save screenshots to Clips.
Eighteen dollars. Once.
TypeFire Pro is a single payment that unlocks unlimited clips, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, notes sync, note version history and saving from AI apps through MCP. There is no subscription and no per-seat pricing.
Free tier, then one payment
No free tier at all
One time
No free tier
One time
Lifetime, or $3.99/mo
Five snippets free, then a subscription
ClipBook starts at $9.99 for one Mac and $14.99 for two, with no free tier to try first. TypeFire is $0 to start and $18 once for unlimited, not locked to a device.
The graph is free, and it needs nothing
Press ` and TypeFire draws every note, snippet and clip on one canvas, using the links, tags and folders already in your files. Nothing to download and nothing to switch on. A connection you made is drawn solid, one TypeFire worked out is drawn dashed.
Turn on Weave and search starts matching what you meant rather than the exact words you typed. It runs on your Mac, with no account and nothing uploaded.
Moving from ClipBook
Still not answered?
Both, in different parts. The text expander is free forever with no cap: unlimited snippets, abbreviations, collections, tags, tokens, and iCloud sync.
The clipboard manager is also permanently free, limited to your 10 most recent clips, and that free version includes OCR search and AI actions on clips rather than being a stripped-down teaser. Separately, there is a 7 day Pro trial that starts automatically on install and needs no card.
When it ends you drop back to the free tier rather than losing the app. Pro is $18 once and removes the 10-clip cap.
You generally do not, and that is true moving between any two clipboard managers.
Clipboard history is transient by nature and neither app offers an import path for the other's database. The practical approach is to run both for a week: keep ClipBook for the old history you might still need, and let TypeFire build up the new one.
Anything in ClipBook you would genuinely hate to lose is a sign it should be a snippet rather than a clip, so copy it once into TypeFire and save it as a snippet with an abbreviation.
Yes, for a single user. ClipBook's cheapest license is $9.99 for one Mac, $14.99 for two, and $29.99 for five.
TypeFire Pro is $18 once and covers up to three of your own Macs, so a laptop and a desktop are the same purchase, restored by email. The larger difference is what the $18 buys: unlimited clips plus Selection Prompts plus Prompt Chains plus an unlimited text expander, rather than a clipboard manager alone.
It is a fair question and the honest answer is that TypeFire is a commercial product without a public repository, so you cannot audit the source the way you can with ClipBook.
What we can point to instead is specific and checkable behavior: clips are encrypted on your Mac with a key that never leaves it, images sit beside it and only your own account can read them, nothing about your clipboard is transmitted anywhere, and copies marked concealed by password managers are never recorded. If open source is a hard requirement, ClipBook is the better choice and we would rather say so.
Partly. TypeFire can paste multiple clips and can insert as plain text, and it has renaming, tagging, pinning, and case conversion on any clip.
It does not currently have ClipBook's copy-and-merge with Cmd C C, text splitting, or per-display window position memory. ClipBook has spent all of its development on clipboard depth, so it is ahead on those specific corners. If your workflow depends on them, that is a real reason to stay.
No, that is the main point of switching. With ClipBook you would pair it with something like TextExpander at $60 a year past its five free snippets, Typinator at $24.99, or Raycast Snippets.
With TypeFire both live in one app, sharing one Accessibility permission, one update cycle, and one search field. ⌘⌃1 searches your snippets, ⌘⌃2 pastes your clips.
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