If you only ever used Notion for notes.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
Why people move from Notion
The specific reasons people give for switching.
Local files load instantly
A 10,000 note vault lists in 214 milliseconds on a release build. An equivalent Notion database is widely reported at five to seven seconds on broadband. Notes are the thing you open twenty times a day, and that difference compounds.
Your notes are files, not blocks
Every note is a plain .md file in a folder you chose, readable in any editor forever. Notion's blocks live in Notion's database, and exports come back as something less than you put in.
It works with no network
Notion is cloud-first and its offline behaviour has never been its strength. TypeFire has no network in the path at all unless you turn on sync.
No monthly fee
Notion Plus is around $10 a month. TypeFire Notes is free, and Pro is $18 once for three Macs with no renewal.
Reach a note without leaving the app you are in
Control Command Shift K searches your whole vault from on top of Slack or Mail and pastes into the document you are already typing. Notion is a tab you switch to.
AI without a second subscription
Notion AI is an upsell on top of the plan. TypeFire runs summarise, outline, continue and extract-tasks on device with Apple Intelligence for nothing, or with your own key.
TypeFire compared with Notion
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | Plain .md files you own | Cloud database, proprietary blocks |
| Speed at 10,000 notes | 214ms to list | Seconds |
| Works offline | Entirely | Limited |
| Price | Free, Pro $18 once | Free tier, Plus ~$10/mo |
| AI | Free, on-device option | Paid add-on |
| Databases and relations | No | Yes, excellent |
| Real-time collaboration | No | Yes |
| Global hotkey over other apps | Yes | No |
Where Notion is genuinely better
Three things Notion does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use Notion.
Databases, and it is not close
Relational databases, formula fields, rollups and filtered views are genuinely powerful and TypeFire has none of it. If your notes are really a project tracker, stay.
Collaboration
Shared pages, comments, permissions and a team that all sees the same thing. TypeFire is a single-user Mac app.
It runs everywhere
Web, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. TypeFire is Mac only.
Templates and community
An enormous template gallery for almost any workflow. TypeFire has snippet templates, not workspace templates.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Notion at any price.
A global hotkey
Notes on top of every app, pasted where you are typing.
Files that outlive the app
Plain markdown you can read in any editor in ten years.
A text expander
Abbreviations that expand in every Mac app, including inside a note.
A clipboard manager with OCR
Everything you copied, searchable by the words inside screenshots.
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
Two months of Paste, or all of TypeFire.
Moving from Notion
Still not answered?
It depends what you used Notion for. If you relied on databases and collaboration, nothing in the local-markdown world replaces that and you should stay.
If you mostly wrote notes, TypeFire keeps them as plain markdown files on your Mac, opens them behind a global hotkey from inside every other app, and costs $18 once rather than roughly $10 a month.
Notion exports to Markdown and CSV. Pages come across as .md files with attachments in folders, and simple notes survive the trip well.
Databases, relations, rollups and formula fields do not, because there is no markdown equivalent, so an export is a good way to rescue writing and a poor way to rescue a project tracker.
For opening and searching notes, substantially.
A 10,000 note vault lists in 214 milliseconds on a release build because the files are local and the list is windowed. Notion at comparable scale is commonly reported at five to seven seconds, since the content is fetched over the network.
No, deliberately. Databases, relations and collaboration are Notion's shape and building a weaker version of them would help nobody.
TypeFire does notes, a clipboard manager and a text expander, all reachable by one keystroke from any app.
Yes for a single user. Notion Plus is about $10 per month.
TypeFire Notes is free, and TypeFire Pro is $18 once covering three Macs with no renewal, which is less than two months of Notion Plus.
Notes that load before you finish the keystroke.
Plain markdown on your Mac, one hotkey away from every app. Free to download, and Pro is one payment rather than a monthly bill.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets