A Pastebot alternative
without the renewal
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
Why people move from Pastebot
The specific reasons people give for switching.
Updates stop unless you keep paying
Pastebot 3 costs $39 direct and includes one year of updates. Additional years are $19. The App Store route is $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year. TypeFire is $18 once and every future Pro feature is included, with no renewal of any kind.
The trial is 14 days, then it stops
Pastebot gives you a fortnight to decide. TypeFire's free tier is permanent: an uncapped text expander and a working clipboard manager at your 10 most recent clips, for as long as you like, with no countdown.
No text expander
Pastebot is a clipboard manager, and a very good one. If you also want abbreviations that expand into full text in every Mac app, that is a second app, a second Accessibility grant and a second thing to update.
No OCR on your screenshots
Pastebot keeps images, but it does not read the words inside them. TypeFire runs on-device text recognition over every image you copy, so a screenshot is findable by a word that appears in it. Free tier, offline.
No AI on your clips
Pastebot has paste filters, which transform text with rules you define. Powerful, but deterministic. TypeFire can summarise, rewrite or translate any clip using Apple Intelligence, a local model, or your own key.
A clip stays a clip
When you notice you have pasted the same paragraph for the fourth time, Pastebot has no permanent home for it. TypeFire promotes any clip into a snippet with an abbreviation you type instead.
TypeFire compared with Pastebot
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | Pastebot | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $0, then $18 once | $39 direct, or $2.99/mo |
| Future updates | Included, forever | 1 year, then $19/yr |
| Free tier | Yes, 10 clips, permanent | No, 14-day trial |
| Text expander included | Yes, unlimited, free | No, clipboard only |
| OCR search inside images | Yes, on-device, free tier | No |
| AI actions on clips | Yes | No |
| Rule-based paste filters | Tokens and scripts | Yes, and deeper |
| Save a clip as a reusable snippet | Yes, with an abbreviation | No |
| Sequential paste of multiple clips | Yes | Yes, and deeper |
| Local-only storage | Yes, encrypted database | Yes |
| Chrome extension for web apps | Yes, free | No |
Pastebot pricing from tapbots.com, August 2026. Both apps store clipboard history locally.
Where Pastebot is genuinely better
Three things Pastebot does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use Pastebot.
Paste filters are genuinely deeper
Pastebot's filter chains transform text with rules you compose yourself, and version 3 added rule-based organisation. If your work involves reshaping pasted text in consistent, repeatable ways, Pastebot does that better than we do, and it does it without an AI provider in the loop.
Tapbots build quality
Tapbots have been making Mac and iOS software for well over a decade, and Pastebot has the polish you would expect. It is a mature, carefully considered app with a long track record.
Deeper clipboard-specific features
A decade of development on one job shows: sequence pasting, per-app paste behaviour, fine-grained organisation. TypeFire covers the common ground but not every corner Pastebot has filled in.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Pastebot at any price.
One payment, no renewal
$18 once, with every future Pro feature included. One licence covers up to three of your own Macs, restored with the email you bought with.
A full text expander, free
Unlimited snippets and abbreviations that expand in every native Mac app and every website, plus rich text, Markdown, dynamic tokens, fill-in placeholders and script snippets.
Screenshots you can search
On-device text recognition reads every image at capture, so you can find a screenshot by a word you saw in it. No provider, no internet, no cost.
AI where you are already working
Summarise, rewrite or translate any clip, or highlight text anywhere on your Mac and rewrite it in place. Apple Intelligence or a local model keeps it on your machine.
The clip-to-snippet loop
Right-click a clip, save it as a snippet, give it an abbreviation. Pastebot has no snippet engine, so this is not something it can add without becoming a different product.
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.
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
Pastebot is $39 plus $19 a year to stay current. TypeFire is $18 once, and the text expander costs nothing.
Moving from Pastebot
Still not answered?
Yes, and the gap widens over time. Pastebot 3 is $39 direct with one year of updates included, then $19 a year to keep receiving them, or $2.99 a month on the App Store.
TypeFire Pro is $18 once with every future Pro feature included and no renewal. Over three years that is $18 against roughly $77 on the direct route.
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.
No, 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 Pastebot for the old history you might still need, and let TypeFire build up the new one.
Anything in Pastebot 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 with an abbreviation.
Partly, and Pastebot is ahead here. TypeFire can insert as plain text, convert case, and run JavaScript or AppleScript snippets that transform whatever they are given, plus dynamic tokens that substitute dates, clipboard contents and your selection.
What it does not have is Pastebot's composable filter chains applied automatically per paste. If reshaping pasted text with repeatable rules is the core of your workflow, that is a real reason to stay.
Because the clipboard manager is half of an app that was already being built.
TypeFire started as a text expander, and Clyp reuses the same storage, search, permissions and overlay. Pastebot's price reflects a decade of work on clipboard depth specifically.
You are not getting the same thing for less; you are getting a broader tool that is not as deep on paste automation.
Clips are stored in a SQLCipher-encrypted database on your Mac, keyed from your macOS Keychain and readable only by your user account.
Image and file blobs sit alongside it with owner-only permissions. Nothing about your clipboard is transmitted anywhere.
Content that password managers mark as confidential is never captured at all, which covers 1Password, Bitwarden and browser autofill.
Yes, that is the main practical difference. With Pastebot you would pair it with something like TextExpander at around $40 a year, Typinator at $24.99, or Alfred's Powerpack.
With TypeFire both halves live in one app, sharing one Accessibility permission, one update cycle and one search field.
Try it before you pay for it
A working clipboard manager and an unlimited text expander for $0. If you want the 10-clip cap gone, that is $18 once, with no renewal.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets