A Raycast clipboard alternative
you pay for once
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
Why people move from Raycast
The specific reasons people give for switching.
Unlimited history is a monthly subscription
Raycast Pro is $8 per user per month billed annually, or $10 month to month, and unlimited clipboard history sits inside it. TypeFire Pro is $18 one time. Two and a bit months of Raycast Pro costs more than TypeFire ever will.
The free plan expires your history at three months
Raycast's free clipboard keeps three months. That is generous, and for many people it is enough. But it is a rolling window that quietly drops the thing you saved in spring, and the only fix is a subscription.
No OCR on your screenshots
Raycast stores images in clipboard history but does not read the text inside them. TypeFire runs on-device text recognition over every image you copy, so you can find a screenshot by a word that appears in it. That is on the free tier.
Snippets and clips do not meet
Raycast has Snippets and it has clipboard history, but a clip cannot become a snippet. In TypeFire, right-click any clip and save it as a snippet with an abbreviation. The thing you copied once becomes three characters you type forever.
You may not want a launcher at all
Raycast replaces Spotlight and brings 1,300 extensions with it. If you only ever wanted clipboard history and text expansion, that is a large app and a large habit change for two features.
AI is part of the same subscription
Raycast AI is bundled into Pro. TypeFire uses your own key or an on-device model, so AI on your clips costs nothing at the app level and works with Apple Intelligence or a local model.
TypeFire compared with Raycast
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | Raycast | |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited clipboard history | $18 once | $8 per month, billed annually |
| Free clipboard history | Yes, 10 most recent, permanent | Yes, rolling 3 months |
| Cost after two years | $18 total | About $192 on the annual plan |
| OCR search inside images | Yes, on-device, free tier | No |
| Text expander included | Yes, unlimited, free | Snippets, yes |
| Save a clip as a reusable snippet | Yes, with an abbreviation | No |
| AI on any clip | Yes, your key or on-device | Yes, inside Pro |
| Replaces Spotlight | No, it sits alongside | Yes, that is the point |
| Extension ecosystem | No | Yes, 1,300+ |
| Windows support | Chrome extension only | Yes |
| Clipboard data stored | Encrypted database on your Mac | Local, cloud sync on Pro |
Raycast pricing from raycast.com, August 2026. Both apps keep clipboard history locally by default.
Where Raycast is genuinely better
Three things Raycast does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use Raycast.
It is a genuinely great launcher
Raycast is one of the best pieces of Mac software of the last few years. Window management, calculations, 1,300 extensions, script commands, all behind one hotkey. TypeFire does not attempt any of that and is not trying to replace it.
Three months free is more than 10 clips
On raw clipboard depth, Raycast's free tier beats ours. If your only requirement is a long free history and you do not care about OCR, snippets or AI, Raycast free is the better deal and we would rather say so.
Cross-platform and team features
Raycast runs on Windows and has team plans with shared snippets and commands. TypeFire is a Mac app with a Chrome extension, and there is no team tier.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Raycast at any price.
One payment instead of twelve a year
$18 once, not $8 a month. One licence covers up to three of your own Macs, restored with the email you bought with.
Screenshots you can actually search
On-device text recognition reads every image you copy, so searching for a word you saw in a screenshot finds the screenshot. Free tier, offline, no AI provider involved.
The clip-to-snippet loop
Promote any clip into a permanent snippet with an abbreviation. Raycast has both halves and no bridge between them; TypeFire was a text expander first, which is why the loop closes.
A real text expander, not just snippets
Rich text, Markdown that expands as styled HTML, dynamic tokens, fill-in placeholders, JavaScript and AppleScript snippets, per-snippet hotkeys, and imports from TextExpander, aText, Alfred and Espanso.
AI that runs on your machine
Apple Intelligence or a local model through Ollama, or your own Claude, OpenAI or Gemini key. No AI subscription at the app level and no markup on tokens.
It does not take over Spotlight
TypeFire adds two hotkeys and stays out of the way. Nothing about your existing launcher habits has to change, so you can run it alongside Raycast if you like the launcher and want the clipboard depth.
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
Raycast Pro is about $96 a year for unlimited clipboard history. TypeFire is $18 once, and the text expander costs nothing at all.
Moving from Raycast
Still not answered?
Yes, and plenty of people will. They do not conflict: Raycast owns the launcher hotkey, TypeFire uses Control Command Shift T for snippets and Control Command Shift V for clips.
If you like Raycast as a launcher but want unlimited clipboard history without a subscription, plus OCR search and a real text expander, running both is a reasonable setup. You can also turn Raycast's clipboard history off to avoid two apps watching the same pasteboard.
Yes, by a wide margin over time. Raycast Pro is $8 per user per month billed annually, or $10 month to month, which is roughly $96 a year.
TypeFire Pro is $18 once and includes every future Pro feature. The comparison is not exactly like for like, because Raycast Pro also includes AI and cloud sync, but if the reason you are considering Pro is unlimited clipboard history, $18 once does that job permanently.
No. Raycast stores images in clipboard history and you can browse them, but it does not read the text inside them, so you cannot search for a word that appears in a screenshot.
TypeFire runs Apple's on-device text recognition over every image at capture, which makes screenshots searchable by their contents. It runs offline, costs nothing, and works on the free tier.
It is a rolling window: clips older than three months are removed unless you subscribe to Pro.
That is more generous than TypeFire's free tier, which keeps your 10 most recent clips, and we would rather be straight about that. The difference is what happens next. Removing TypeFire's cap costs $18 once; removing Raycast's costs $18 every month.
No. TypeFire is not a launcher replacement. It adds a Spotlight-style search across your own snippet library on Control Command Shift T, and a clipboard overlay on Control Command Shift V, and otherwise stays out of the way.
Your existing Spotlight, Raycast or Alfred setup is untouched.
There is no direct Raycast importer, because Raycast does not export snippets in a documented interchange format.
TypeFire imports from TextExpander, aText, Alfred, Espanso, CSV and JSON. In practice most people re-create their handful of Raycast snippets manually, since the abbreviations carry over even when the files do not.
Pay once, not monthly
A working clipboard manager and an unlimited text expander for $0. Unlimited clips, AI prompts and chains for $18 once, covering up to three of your own Macs.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets