Craft alternative for Mac. Beautiful documents, or documents you keep.
Is there a Craft alternative with a one time price?
Craft is billed yearly. TypeFire Notes is free, and Pro is $18 once for three Macs with every future Pro feature included.
Notes are plain markdown files in your own folder, so they open anywhere. You also get a text expander and a clipboard manager in the same app.
Why people move from Craft
The specific reasons people give for switching.
Markdown files, not Craft documents
Craft exports markdown; in TypeFire the markdown file is the note. Nothing needs converting when you want your writing somewhere else. Tables with grips, callouts, footnotes and a slash menu for every block, and the file stays markdown.
One payment
Craft Pro is roughly $8 to $10 a month. TypeFire Notes is free and Pro is $18 once for three Macs, with no renewal.
Works entirely offline
Local files with no service in the path. Craft is cloud-backed by design.
Reach a note without leaving your app
⌘⌃3 searches your vault from on top of whatever you are in and pastes into the document you are already typing.
Opens a vault you already have
Point it at an existing folder of markdown, including an Obsidian vault, in place.
A text expander inside your writing
Type an abbreviation in a note and it expands, the same as anywhere else on the Mac.
TypeFire compared with Craft
Prices and capabilities as of September 2026.
| TypeFire | Craft | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | Plain .md files you own | Craft cloud, markdown export |
| Price | Free, Pro $18 once | ~$8 to $10 per month |
| Works offline | Entirely | Partial |
| Design and polish | Good | Exceptional |
| iOS and iPad | No | Yes |
| Sharing and publishing | No | Yes |
| Global hotkey over other apps | Yes | No |
| Text expander built in | Yes | No |
What Craft does better
Four of them, named plainly, with what TypeFire does instead directly below.
It is the better looking app, clearly
Craft's native feel, typography and blocks are consistently praised against Electron competitors, and that is a real reason to pay for it.
Sharing and publishing
Turning a document into a shareable link with a designed layout is something Craft does very well and TypeFire does not do at all.
iPhone and iPad
Craft is genuinely good on iPad. TypeFire is a Mac app.
Collaboration
Craft supports collaborating on documents. TypeFire is single user.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Craft at any price.
Files you own outright
Plain markdown that outlives any app, including ours.
A global hotkey
Notes on top of every app, pasted where you are typing.
A clipboard manager and text expander
Both included, both system-wide.
AI with no extra plan
On device with Apple Intelligence, or your own key.
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
Two months of Paste, or all of TypeFire.
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 Craft
Still not answered?
Obsidian and TypeFire are the main local-file options.
TypeFire suits you if you want your writing as plain markdown files in a folder you own, reachable by a global hotkey from inside any other app, for a one-time $18 rather than a monthly subscription. Craft remains the better choice if design polish and document sharing matter most.
Yes, Craft exports documents as markdown. Export to a folder, point TypeFire at that folder, and the notes open in place with no import step.
Craft-specific blocks and page styling will flatten, since markdown has no equivalent.
Yes. Craft Pro is roughly $8 to $10 per month.
TypeFire Notes is free and TypeFire Pro is $18 once for three Macs with no renewal, which is around two months of Craft.
No, honestly. Craft's design is exceptional and consistently singled out in reviews.
TypeFire's editor is clean and fast and renders markdown live, but if the look of the app while you write is what you are buying, Craft wins that comparison.
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