Alfred

Alfred is the thing you hit instead of Spotlight, and the reason people stay loyal for a decade is the workflow editor: you wire hotkeys, scripts and web APIs into small private tools without writing a real app, and the community has published thousands of them. The launcher itself costs nothing. The Powerpack is what unlocks clipboard history, snippet expansion, file actions, themes, settings sync and workflows.

It is priced in pounds, which matters twice over. The £34 Single Licence is around $46 today, and that number drifts with the exchange rate — your card may add a conversion fee on top of it. It is also sold explicitly as a v5 License. You own Alfred 5. The buy page currently promises a free upgrade to Alfred 6, due this autumn, to anyone purchasing now, but that is worded as an offer rather than a term of the licence, and past major versions have been paid upgrades. The £59 Mega Supporter tier is the one that says free lifetime upgrades, and if you expect to still be using Alfred in ten years, the extra £25 is the cheaper path.

There is no Powerpack trial, but the free app is fully usable, so you can find out whether the launcher suits your hands before spending anything. If clipboard history and snippets are all you actually want, Raycast's free tier covers those for nothing.