Everything Maccy does,
and the parts it skips
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
Why people move from Maccy
The specific reasons people give for switching.
Screenshots are not searchable
Maccy handles images but does not read them. If you screenshot an invoice, you can scroll back to find it but you cannot search for the invoice number. TypeFire runs on-device OCR on every image at capture time, so you can.
No way to promote a clip into something permanent
When you notice you have copied the same paragraph for the fourth time, Maccy can pin it. TypeFire can turn it into a snippet with an abbreviation, so you type three characters instead of going to look for it.
You are still running a second app for typing
Maccy plus TextExpander is $40 a year. Maccy plus Typinator is $24.99. Maccy plus Raycast means running Raycast. TypeFire is one app with one Accessibility permission covering both jobs.
No AI, anywhere
Maccy is deliberately minimal, which is a legitimate design position. It does mean there is nothing to summarise a long thread you copied or rewrite a paragraph in place.
Organisation is thin by design
Maccy gives you a flat searchable list and pinning. No tags, no naming, no filtering by which app something came from, no type filters. That is fine at 50 clips and less fine at 500.
It is a menu bar list, not a workspace
Maccy is intentionally a small popup. If you want to browse visually, see image thumbnails at a glance, or work through what you collected this morning, there is no view for that.
TypeFire compared with Maccy
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | Maccy | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0, then $18 once for unlimited | Free, and always will be |
| Open source | No | Yes, MIT licensed |
| Clip limit on the free tier | 10 most recent | Unlimited |
| OCR search inside images | Yes, on-device, free tier | No |
| AI actions on clips | Yes, free tier | No |
| Text expander included | Yes, unlimited, free | No |
| Save a clip as a reusable snippet | Yes, with an abbreviation | No |
| Tags, names, and source-app filters | Yes | No, flat list plus pinning |
| Visual grid with thumbnails | Yes | No, menu bar list |
| Paste by number | Yes, Cmd 1-9 | Yes, Cmd 1-9 |
| Ignore password managers | Yes | Yes |
| Local-only storage | Yes, encrypted database | Yes |
| Homebrew install | No, signed DMG | Yes |
| Resource footprint | Native, no browser runtime | Very small |
Maccy is MIT licensed and free with no paid tier of any kind. If a flat, fast, text-first clipboard history is all you want, it is hard to argue with and this page is not trying to.
Where Maccy is genuinely better
Three things Maccy does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use Maccy.
It is free and unlimited, and TypeFire is not
Maccy keeps as many clips as you like without ever asking for money. TypeFire's free tier stops at your 10 most recent, and going beyond that is $8. On raw clipboard history for zero dollars, Maccy wins outright and there is no version of this comparison where it does not.
Open source, MIT licensed
You can read exactly what Maccy does with your clipboard, build it yourself, and fork it if it ever goes in a direction you dislike. TypeFire is a commercial closed-source app. If auditability is a requirement rather than a preference, that settles it.
It is smaller and simpler
Maccy does one thing, opens instantly, and has almost no surface area to learn. TypeFire is a bigger app with a snippet library, AI providers to configure, and more settings. If you want a clipboard history and nothing else, the extra is cost rather than benefit.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Maccy at any price.
Screenshots you can search by their contents
Every image is read on-device with Apple Vision when it is captured, and that text is indexed. Search for a word you saw in a screenshot and the screenshot comes back. Free tier, not a paid extra.
The clip-to-snippet loop
Right-click any clip, choose Save as snippet, give it an abbreviation. It leaves your rolling clipboard history and becomes something permanent you type rather than something you find. Maccy has no snippet engine, so this is not a feature it could add without becoming a different app.
A full text expander, free and uncapped
Unlimited snippets, collections, tags, dynamic tokens for dates and clipboard contents, rich text and Markdown, script snippets in JavaScript and AppleScript, per-snippet hotkeys, and imports from TextExpander and aText.
Actual organisation
Name a clip so you can find it later, tag it, filter by the app it came from, filter by type, group by date or source, and browse as a thumbnail grid or a dense list. This is the difference between 50 clips and 500 clips being useful.
AI on clips and on the text you are writing
Summarise a long thread you copied, or highlight a sentence in any app and rewrite it in place with its abbreviation or a shortcut you assign. Runs on Apple Intelligence or a local Ollama model, so it can be genuinely on-device.
A Chrome extension
Your snippets in every web app on any operating system, including Windows and ChromeOS. Free, no paid tier.
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. Clipboard managers have no snippet engine, text expanders do not watch your clipboard, and no note app has either, which is why the loop only closes here.
- 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 database, owner-only files
Clips are stored in an encrypted SQLite database on your Mac. The key is generated on your machine and kept in the macOS Keychain. Image files sit alongside the database with owner-only permissions.
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 and note version history. 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
Subscription, forever
Maccy is free and unlimited, which no price comparison beats. The question is whether OCR, snippets, and a text expander are worth $18 to you.
Moving from Maccy
Still not answered?
If a fast, flat, text-first clipboard history is all you want, you should not, and Maccy is an excellent answer.
The case for TypeFire is not price, it is scope. Three things Maccy does not do at any price: it does not read your screenshots, so images are not searchable by their contents; it has no snippet engine, so a clip can never become an abbreviation you type; and it has no text expander, so you are running a second app and probably paying for that one. If none of those matter, stay with Maccy.
For a lot of people, yes, because clipboard history is overwhelmingly recency-biased: the thing you want is almost always something you copied in the last few minutes.
Ten covers that. Where it stops being enough is when you are collecting through a long session, researching across many sources, or reaching back to something from yesterday.
The free tier is not a crippled preview though: OCR search, source-app filters, pinning, tagging, Quick Paste, and AI actions on clips all work inside those 10, and pinning exempts a clip from the age, count and size retention rules, though not from the free 10 itself.
Yes, since it is running a snippet engine and a clipboard manager rather than only the latter.
TypeFire is a native Swift and Rust app rather than Electron, there is no bundled browser runtime, clipboard watching is event-driven rather than polling, and OCR runs once per image at capture time instead of repeatedly. Retention settings cap the database by count, age, or total size. Maccy is still the lighter app of the two.
It is a genuine advantage and worth taking seriously, especially for an app that sees everything you copy.
Maccy is MIT licensed and auditable; TypeFire is closed source and you cannot verify its behaviour by reading it. What we can offer instead is specific and checkable claims: clips are stored in a SQLCipher-encrypted database whose key is generated on your machine and lives in the macOS Keychain, image blobs sit alongside with owner-only file permissions, nothing about your clipboard is transmitted anywhere, and copies marked concealed by password managers are never recorded. If open source is a hard requirement, Maccy is the right call.
You can, and some people do during a switch, but it is worth turning one off before long.
Two clipboard managers both watching the pasteboard means every copy is recorded twice and both apps hold their own history of it, which doubles the surface area for no benefit. If you are trying TypeFire, run them side by side for a few days, then disable Maccy's launch at login once you have decided.
You do not, and no clipboard manager imports another's database.
That is less of a loss than it sounds, because clipboard history is transient by design. The part worth moving is whatever you pinned in Maccy, since pinning is you saying this matters.
Copy each pinned item into TypeFire once and save it as a snippet with an abbreviation, and you end up with something better than a pin: instead of opening a window to find it, you type three characters and it appears.
Keep the history. Add the rest.
Searchable screenshots, a real snippet engine, and AI in the same app, free to try for as long as you like. If unlimited clips for zero dollars is the whole requirement, Maccy already wins.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets