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BBEdit

The 1992 Mac text editor that still sells perpetual licences

Price: $59.99 once

Paid upgradesMajor versions cost again

Buy direct Website

Price read on barebones.com, the page Buy direct opens.

The catch

Major versions are paid upgrades, currently $29.99 to $39.99 every couple of years

The full picture

Bare Bones charges for major versions, at roughly half list price, on a cadence of about two to three years — skipping one is fine and the version you own keeps working. macOS only, so the licence is worth nothing to you on Linux or Windows. After the evaluation period the app does not stop: it drops into a reduced free mode with the core editing features, which for occasional use may be all you ever need. It is not an IDE and has no ambitions to become one.

Pays back in
18 months
Seats
No Mac count statedOne individual licence covers every computer you are the sole user of; the Mac App Store version is capped at five.
Developer account
None needed
Buy once$59.99Rent 5 years$200

$140 kept over five years, and you still have the app.
Against Ulysses at $40 a year, $39.99/year, relevant if you were paying it mainly to write plain text. Also replaces Nova update renewals and iA Writer.

What it looks like

BBEdit: BBEdit's HTML project window in dark mode: Project sidebar with a deep file tree and a 'Currently Open Documents' list, the editor showing syntax-coloured HTML with line numbers and fold arrows, a floating Utilities palette (Format, Text to HTML, Remove Comments, Raise/Lower Tag Case), an HTML Tools palette, a Character Inspector panel reporting hex/decimal/unicode for the selection, the system Colors picker, and the status bar reading line, language, Unicode (UTF-8), Unix (LF) and save time. Apple's own title for it is '1 - HTML project window'. 2560x1600 PNG.
BBEdit's HTML project window in dark mode. Mac App Store screenshot set (id 404009241, via the iTunes lookup API)
BBEdit: BBEdit's Multi-File Search dialog in light mode - Find and Replace fields holding a grep pattern, Case sensitive / Entire word / Grep / Exclude matches checkboxes, a 'Search in' tree of Notebooks, Open Editing Windows, Open Text Documents and Recent Folders, and file/folder filters - over a Search Results window reporting '20367 occurrences ... found in 590 files' with per-file hit lists, plus the editor behind. This is the feature the listing leads on. 2560x1600 PNG.
BBEdit's Multi-File Search dialog in light mode - Find and Replace fields holding a grep pattern, Case sensitive / Entire word / Grep / Exclude matches checkboxes, a 'Search in' tree of Notebooks, Open Editing Windows, Open Text Documents and Recent Folders, and file/folder filters - over a Search Results window reporting '20367 occurrences ... found in 590 files' with per-file hit lists, plus the editor behind. Mac App Store screenshot set (id 404009241)
BBEdit: BBEdit editing site.css in light mode with the Minimap panel docked on the right: Project sidebar with an expanded tree, 'Currently Open Documents' list, syntax-coloured CSS with line numbers around line 1016, and a status bar reading 'L: 1016 C: 25 / CSS / Unicode (UTF-8) / Unix (LF) / Saved 4:19:15 PM / 30,948 / 3,447 / 1,167 / 100%'. 2560x1600 PNG.
BBEdit editing site.css in light mode with the Minimap panel docked on the right. Mac App Store screenshot set (id 404009241)
BBEdit App Store screenshot 1 of 3
BBEdit App Store screenshot 2 of 3
BBEdit App Store screenshot 3 of 3

3 screenshots published by the developer on the Mac App Store.

Images belong to their developers.

What you’re buying

BBEdit has shipped since 1992 and has never been a subscription, which tells you most of what you need to know about the company selling it. It is not an IDE and is not trying to catch one. It is a text editor that is unreasonably good at the work nobody writes posts about: grep search and replace across ten thousand files, opening a multi-gigabyte log without the machine swapping, column selection, sorting and deduplicating lines, and Text Factories that save a chain of transformations so you can run the same cleanup again next month.

Around that sit shell worksheets, direct editing of files over SFTP, and Git integration, all inside an app that behaves the way Mac apps are supposed to.

$59.99 buys the current version outright. Bare Bones charges for major versions — currently $29.99 coming from the previous one, $39.99 from anything older — and those land every two or three years, so call it twenty dollars a year if you always want the newest. Skip an upgrade and nothing breaks.

macOS only, which matters if half your work happens on Linux. And after the trial the app keeps running in a reduced free mode rather than locking, so if you need a big-file viewer twice a year, do not pay: install it, live in the free mode, and buy the licence the day the grep window saves you an afternoon.

What owners report

Points that recur across the discussions below. A report of what users say, not our verdict: we don’t review software.

Praised

  • Multi-file search and replace is the feature owners name first, in both Hacker News threads, usually as the thing no other editor matches.
  • Opening files that break other editors comes up repeatedly, with people describing 4GB SQL dumps and 10GB logs.
  • The absence of a subscription, and the app behaving like a proper Mac app, are cited again and again as why people keep paying.

Criticised

  • Commenters in both Hacker News threads list the same gaps against modern editors: no full LSP support and no multiple cursors.
  • macOS-only availability is raised each time by people whose work has since moved to Linux or Windows.

Details

The price in full

$59.99 individual licence for the current version. Upgrades are priced separately: $29.99 from 15.x, $39.99 from 14.x or earlier. Multi-user pricing is by quote. No subscription option appears anywhere on the store page.

The BBEdit page at barebones.com
The developer’s own page. barebones.com, captured 22 Sep 2026
Free trial
Yes
Works offline
Yes
Apple Silicon
Native
On Setapp
No
Minimum macOS
not stated
Developer
Bare Bones Software

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