An Unclutter alternative
for the clipboard half
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
Why people move from Unclutter
The specific reasons people give for switching.
The clipboard is one of three features
Unclutter's value is the combination of shelf, notes and clipboard behind one gesture. That also means the clipboard manager is a third of a $19.99 app rather than the thing it was built for.
No search inside images
TypeFire reads the text inside every screenshot you copy, on your Mac, so you can find one by a word it contains. That is not something a bundled clipboard history does.
No text expansion
Notes and a shelf help you park things. Abbreviations that expand into full text as you type solve the opposite problem, and Unclutter does not do it.
No AI on your clips
Summarise a thread you copied, rewrite it, or translate it, using Apple Intelligence, a local model, or your own key. Free tier.
You pay up front
TypeFire's free tier is permanent, so you can judge both halves for as long as you like before deciding whether $18 is worth it.
TypeFire compared with Unclutter
Prices and capabilities as of August 2026.
| TypeFire | Unclutter | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $0, then $18 once | $19.99 |
| Free tier | Yes, 10 clips, permanent | Trial only |
| File shelf | No | Yes |
| Notepad | No, snippets instead | Yes |
| Clipboard search | Yes, including inside images | Basic |
| OCR search inside images | Yes, on-device, free tier | No |
| Text expander | Yes, unlimited, free | No |
| AI actions on clips | Yes, free tier | No |
| Save a clip as a reusable snippet | Yes, with an abbreviation | No |
| Encrypted clipboard storage | Yes, SQLCipher | No |
Unclutter pricing from unclutterapp.com, August 2026. The two apps overlap only on clipboard history.
Where Unclutter is genuinely better
Three things Unclutter does better. If any of them is your deciding factor, use Unclutter.
The file shelf is genuinely useful
Dragging files to a scratch space at the top of the screen and picking them up in another app is a real workflow, and TypeFire has no equivalent. If the shelf is why you own Unclutter, keep it.
Three tools behind one gesture
Pull down from the top of the screen and you get notes, files and clipboard. That coherence is the product, and it is a reasonable $19.99.
It is not trying to be a clipboard manager
Judging Unclutter purely on clipboard depth is slightly unfair. It bundles a decent history alongside two other things, and for many people that is enough.
What TypeFire adds
Not available in Unclutter at any price.
A clipboard manager built as one
Search, filters by type and source app, pinning, tagging, renaming, retention by age or count or disk budget, and previews suited to each content type.
Screenshots you can search
On-device text recognition reads every image at capture, so the screenshot you took last Tuesday is findable by a word inside it.
A full text expander, free
Unlimited abbreviations expanding everywhere, with rich text, Markdown, dynamic tokens, fill-in placeholders and script snippets.
AI on clips and on selection
Rewrite, translate or summarise a clip, or highlight text anywhere on your Mac and transform it in place.
It runs alongside Unclutter
If the shelf and notes are why you bought it, keep them. TypeFire takes two hotkeys and handles expansion and clipboard depth; just turn Unclutter's clipboard off so two apps are not watching the same pasteboard.
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
Unclutter is $19.99 for three tools. TypeFire is $0 to start and $18 once for the clipboard half done properly, plus a free text expander.
Moving from Unclutter
Still not answered?
No. TypeFire keeps files you have copied in your clipboard history, with the ability to open them or copy their path, but there is no drag-to-park shelf and no notepad.
If those are the features you use daily, Unclutter is doing a job TypeFire does not attempt.
Yes, and it is a reasonable combination. Keep Unclutter for the shelf and notes, and let TypeFire handle clipboard history and text expansion.
Turn Unclutter's clipboard module off first: two apps monitoring the same pasteboard produce duplicate entries and can compete over restoring the clipboard after a paste.
Yes for the clipboard half. Unclutter is $19.99 for all three modules.
TypeFire is $0 to start and $18 once for unlimited clips, with the text expander free either way. They are not the same product though, so the fair comparison is only on clipboard history.
It keeps them, previews them as thumbnails, and reads the text inside them using Apple's on-device text recognition at capture time.
That means searching for a word you saw in a screenshot finds the screenshot. It runs offline, costs nothing, and is available on the free tier.
Keep the shelf. Upgrade the clipboard.
A clipboard manager built as one, with searchable screenshots and an uncapped text expander, for $0. $18 once for unlimited clips.
Free text expander, clipboard manager and markdown notes. $18 once for unlimited clips, notes sync and AI prompts.
⌃⌘⇧V your clips⌃⌘⇧T your snippets