TextSniper

TextSniper does one thing. You press a hotkey, drag a box around anything on screen, and the text inside it is on your clipboard. A locked PDF, a screenshot someone pasted into Slack, a frame of a video tutorial, a photo of a printed page — it all becomes text you can paste. Recognition is Apple's own on-device engine, so nothing leaves the machine and it works with the wifi off.

Eight dollars covers one Mac, ten covers three, and both of those come through Gumroad direct from the developer — that is the purchase the seven-day money-back guarantee applies to. The twelve-dollar unlimited-devices licence is a Mac App Store sale instead, so Apple's refund rules govern it. The developer says openly that major upgrades will cost extra, which at this price is hard to be indignant about.

Two limits worth knowing before you buy. It reads the screen, one selection at a time, so a folder of two hundred scans wants a proper batch tool instead. And accuracy tracks Apple's recognition: printed text is near-perfect, handwriting is a coin flip. If you already keep Acrobat Pro around for other reasons, its OCR covers this. If you don't, this deletes the entire category of upload-your-document-here websites for less than lunch.