Keyboard Maestro

Keyboard Maestro is the automation tool you graduate to when Shortcuts stops being enough. A macro is a trigger plus a list of actions, and the trigger can be a hotkey, a typed abbreviation, a time of day, a USB device appearing, an application activating, or a specific image showing up on screen. The actions include genuine conditionals, loops and variables, so what you end up writing is a small program that happens to control your Mac rather than a linear recipe.

It looks its age. The editor is a three-pane window that has not been redrawn in years, and the first week involves a lot of reading the forum, where people have been trading macros since the mid-2000s.

Thirty-six dollars buys version 11 outright, and you can keep running it as long as it launches. What it does not buy is version 12: major releases land roughly every couple of years and cost $25 to move up. That is still far cheaper than anything billed monthly, but it is a recurring bill of a sort, and worth planning for. Expect to grant broad accessibility and automation permissions before anything works.

If your ambitions stop at opening three apps every morning, Shortcuts already does that and costs nothing.