Lifetime Mac
Window management & desktop control

BetterTouchTool

Gestures, shortcuts and window snapping, with a real $25 lifetime licence

Price: $15 once

This versionThe next major is a new purchase

Price read on folivora.ai, the page Buy direct opens.

The catch

The $15 licence stops getting updates after two years; only the $25 tier is a true lifetime

The full picture

The $15 tier is time-limited rather than version-limited: after two years you keep the last build you were sent, so a later macOS release may eventually break something that never gets fixed. The $25 lifetime tier is the one to buy if you intend to keep the app. Configuration effort is real — this is not an install-and-forget utility. It is also on Setapp, where it stops working if the membership lapses.

Pays back in
2 months
Seats
No Mac count statedOne licence covers all your personal Macs.
Developer account
None needed
Buy once$15Rent 5 years$540

$525 kept over five years, and you still have the app.
Against Setapp at $108 a year, Mac plan billed annually; $14.99/month if billed monthly. Also replaces Swish and Rectangle Pro.

What it looks like

Images belong to their developers.

What you’re buying

BetterTouchTool is the app you reach for when macOS almost does what you want and you are willing to spend an evening telling it exactly what you want instead. Custom trackpad and Magic Mouse gestures, per-app keyboard remaps, drag-to-edge window snapping with saved layouts, notch and Touch Bar widgets, scripts attached to any of it. It is less a window manager than a general input layer, and it can retire three or four single-purpose utilities at once.

The licensing is unusually plain-spoken and worth reading twice. $15 gets you updates for two years; after that the app keeps running but stays on the last build you received, which eventually means a macOS release breaks something and no fix arrives. $25 gets every update for as long as the app exists, plus anything else Andreas Hegenberg ships in the two years after you buy. People run this app for a decade, so the $25 tier is usually the cheaper of the two in the end.

The trial is 45 days with no account, which is long enough to find out whether you enjoy this kind of tinkering or resent it. That is the real question. If you open the settings window, see how many panes there are and close it again, that is a legitimate answer — Rectangle or Swish will make you happier for a tenth of the attention.

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

  • Owners repeatedly describe it as the app that absorbs several smaller utilities at once: clipboard history, snippets, key remaps, window moving and gestures
  • Long-term users say they have kept paying for it for close to a decade and call it indispensable
  • The perpetual licence rather than a subscription is raised unprompted as a reason people bought it

Criticised

  • Owners repeatedly report that the feature they wanted was already there but buried several panes deep, and that they found it by accident rather than by looking

Details

The price in full

Standard Licence $15, which "receives updates for 2 years", after which you keep the last version you received forever. Lifetime Licence $25, which "receives all updates while BetterTouchTool exists" plus any other macOS apps the developer releases in the following two years. Exact price varies with country and tax. 45-day free trial, no account required.

The BetterTouchTool page at folivora.ai
The developer’s own page. folivora.ai, captured 22 Sep 2026
Free trial
Yes
Works offline
Yes
Apple Silicon
Native
Minimum macOS
not stated
Developer
Andreas Hegenberg (folivora.ai)

Also bought outright