Notes without a monthly bill.
Is there a note taking app for Mac with no subscription?
TypeFire has no subscription. Notes are free in full, and Pro is $18 once for up to three Macs, with every future Pro feature at that same price.
Notes stay as plain markdown files you own, syncing over your own iCloud rather than a service you rent.
Why people move from subscription note apps
The specific reasons people give for switching.
The notes half costs nothing
Point TypeFire at a folder of markdown, get a global hotkey over every app, quick capture, daily notes, wikilinks, backlinks and AI on a note. None of that is behind a paywall or a trial clock.
Pro is one payment, not a plan
$18 once, covering three Macs. No renewal, no per-seat pricing, and every future Pro feature is included in the same payment.
The subscription math
Notion Plus is around $10 a month. Craft Pro is $8 to $10. Bear is $2.99. Obsidian Sync is $4 to $8. TypeFire Pro is $18 in total, once.
Your notes are not hostage to the plan
They are plain markdown files in a folder you chose. If you stop paying, or we disappear, every note is still readable in any editor. That is not true of a proprietary cloud format.
AI without an AI subscription
Summarize, outline, continue and extract tasks run on device with Apple Intelligence for no key and no cost, or with your own Claude, OpenAI or Gemini key. Notion AI is an upsell on top of the plan.
TypeFire compared with subscription note apps
Prices and capabilities as of September 2026.
| TypeFire | subscription note apps | |
|---|---|---|
| Notes features | Free | Free tier or subscription |
| Paid tier | $18 once | $3 to $10 per month |
| Cost over three years | $18 | $108 to $360 |
| Covers | 3 Macs | Per user |
| Notes readable without the app | Yes, plain markdown | Often not |
| AI included | Free, on device option | Usually an add-on |
What subscription note apps does better
Two of them, named plainly, with what TypeFire does instead directly below.
A subscription funds continuous work
Recurring revenue pays for ongoing development and infrastructure, and apps in this category ship steadily because of it. A one-time price is a different bet, and it is fair to say so.
Managed sync and mobile
Cloud note apps sync everywhere including phones, with servers doing the reconciling. TypeFire is Mac only and syncs through your own iCloud.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in subscription note apps at any price.
A global hotkey over every app
Notes on top of whatever you are working in, pasted where you are typing.
A text expander
Abbreviations that expand anywhere on the Mac, including inside a note.
A clipboard manager
Everything you copied, searchable by the words inside screenshots.
Files you keep either way
Plain markdown in a folder you chose, readable forever.
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 subscription note apps
Still not answered?
TypeFire's note features are free with no subscription: the markdown vault, a global hotkey over every app, quick capture, daily notes, wikilinks, backlinks and AI on your notes.
TypeFire Pro is a single $18 purchase covering three Macs that adds notes sync, version history and clipboard features, and it never renews.
Six things: notes sync between your Macs, note version history, unlimited clipboard history instead of the 10 most recent, Selection Prompts, Prompt Chains, and saving and editing from AI apps through MCP.
Screenshot OCR search, Quick Paste, pinning and tags are free on the 10-clip tier and stay that way. It is one payment for up to three Macs, with every future Pro feature included.
Nothing. Notes are plain markdown files in a folder you chose, so they stay readable in any editor whether or not you have Pro.
Losing Pro would remove sync and version history, not access to your writing.
No. The free tier is permanent, not a countdown.
There is a separate 7 day Pro trial that starts when you install and needs no card, and when it ends you drop back to the free tier rather than losing the app.
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