Raycast

Raycast is the newest of the three serious Mac launchers and the only one where the part most people use costs nothing, with no trial clock ticking. Free gets you the launcher, clipboard history, snippets, quicklinks, a calculator that handles units and conversions, window snapping that saves you installing a tiling app, script commands, and an extension store with thousands of entries in it.

Two caps on that free tier are easy to miss until they bite. Clipboard history is kept for three months rather than forever, and Raycast Notes stops at five notes. Lifting either one means subscribing: Pro is $10 a month or $96 a year, with Pro Plus and Pro Max at $192 and $480 a year, mostly for AI models and cloud sync.

So the honest framing is that Raycast is here as a free app, not as something you buy once. There is no lifetime tier, no perpetual licence, nothing to own. Raycast is venture-funded, and a generous free tier is a business decision rather than a contract — if it narrows, you have no licence to fall back on and no source to fork, because it is not open source. Alfred's Mega Supporter licence costs money precisely so that it cannot be withdrawn from you.

Use it, enjoy it, and keep your snippets somewhere you could export them from.