A PastePal alternative
with a text expander built in
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
Why people move from PastePal
The specific reasons people give for switching.
You pay before you know
PastePal's full version is a $14.99 purchase. TypeFire's free tier is permanent: an uncapped text expander and a clipboard manager at your 10 most recent clips, for as long as you like.
No text expansion
PastePal keeps what you copied. It does not turn an abbreviation into a paragraph as you type. That is a different job and one people usually solve with a second app.
No OCR on your screenshots
TypeFire reads the text inside every image you copy, on your Mac, so a screenshot is findable by a word it contains. Free tier, offline.
No AI on your clips
Summarise, rewrite or translate anything you copied, with Apple Intelligence or a local model, or your own key.
Nothing becomes permanent
TypeFire promotes any clip into a snippet with an abbreviation. PastePal has no snippet engine, so a clip stays a clip.
TypeFire compared with PastePal
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | PastePal | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $0, then $18 once | $14.99 |
| Free tier | Yes, 10 clips, permanent | Limited trial |
| iPhone and iPad | No, Mac only | Yes |
| Clipboard sync across devices | Text clips only, opt-in | Yes, via iCloud |
| Text expander included | Yes, unlimited, free | No |
| OCR search inside images | Yes, on-device, free tier | No |
| AI actions on clips | Yes, free tier | No |
| Save a clip as a reusable snippet | Yes, with an abbreviation | No |
| Local encrypted storage | Yes, SQLCipher | Local plus iCloud |
| Chrome extension for web apps | Yes, free | No |
PastePal pricing from its App Store listing, August 2026. Prices and bundles vary by store and promotion.
Where PastePal is genuinely better
Three things PastePal does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use PastePal.
It runs on iPhone and iPad
PastePal syncs your clipboard across Mac, iPhone and iPad through iCloud. TypeFire's clipboard manager is Mac only, and only text clips sync between Macs, behind a switch that is off by default. If cross-device clipboard is the reason you are looking, PastePal does that and we do not.
Mature cross-device sync
Building reliable clipboard sync across Apple platforms is genuinely hard, and PastePal has done it. Our sync is deliberately narrow: snippets sync fully, clips only if you turn it on and only as text.
One purchase covers the family of apps
Buy once and use it everywhere it runs, which is a reasonable deal for the scope.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in PastePal at any price.
A full text expander, free
Unlimited abbreviations expanding in every native Mac app and every website, with 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 one by a word you saw in it. No provider, no internet, no cost.
AI on your clips and your selection
Summarise, rewrite or translate a clip, or highlight text anywhere and rewrite it in place. Chain several prompts onto one trigger.
A permanent free tier
Judge it for as long as you like. The clipboard works free at 10 clips with every feature available, not as a stripped-down preview.
The clip-to-snippet loop
Right-click a clip, save it as a snippet, give it an abbreviation, stop looking it up.
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
PastePal is $14.99. TypeFire is $0 to start and $18 once, with the text expander free either way.
Moving from PastePal
Still not answered?
No. TypeFire's clipboard manager is Mac only.
Text clips can sync between your Macs behind a switch that is off by default, and images and files never sync by design. Snippets do sync through your own iCloud Drive as plain Markdown files.
If clipboard sync to iPhone and iPad is your requirement, PastePal does that and TypeFire does not.
Yes at the entry point and in total. PastePal's full version is a $14.99 purchase; TypeFire is $0 to start and $18 once for unlimited clips, with the text expander free either way.
The relevant question is whether you need cross-device clipboard, because that is the one thing the extra cost buys you that we cannot match.
No, and that is true between any two clipboard managers.
Clipboard history is transient and neither app imports the other's database. Run both for a week and let the old history age out.
Anything you would hate to lose should be a snippet, so copy it once into TypeFire and give it an abbreviation.
In TypeFire, clips are stored in a SQLCipher-encrypted database on your Mac, keyed from your macOS Keychain.
Image and file blobs sit alongside it with owner-only permissions. Content that password managers mark as confidential is never captured.
Note that if you enable text-clip sync, those clips travel through your own iCloud account rather than a TypeFire server.
Free to start, $18 to go unlimited
A working clipboard manager and an uncapped text expander for $0, with searchable screenshots and AI on any clip.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets