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Transmit

File transfer to servers and cloud storage, bought once

Price: $45 once

This versionThe next major is a new purchase

Buy direct

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

The catch

A future Transmit 6 would be a separate purchase, as the jump from 4 to 5 was

The full picture

What you own is Transmit 5, including its point releases. Panic has charged for major versions before and would be expected to again, so treat this as buying the current app rather than every future one. It is Mac only: the iOS edition of Transmit was discontinued and is not coming back, so an iPhone workflow needs something else. Cloud connections run on your own accounts, and the storage bills stay with those providers.

Pays back in
19 months
Seats
No Mac count statedPanic licenses per person rather than per Mac. Their support page states that a licence "permits you to use the app on all of the Macs in use by you, as long as you are the only one using the app" - a second person needs their own licence.
Developer account
Optional
Buy once$45Rent 5 years$145

$100 kept over five years, and you still have the app.
Against CloudMounter at $29 a year, personal one-year subscription for one Mac. Also replaces Mountain Duck update renewals.

What it looks like

Transmit: The full Transmit 5 window unframed, filling the shot: local file browser on the left with breadcrumb path and a list of files with sizes and dates, and the dark right pane showing the Quick Connect form — Protocol SFTP, Address panic.com, Port 22, User Name, Key, Remote Path, with 'Add to Servers' and 'Connect' buttons. The best single shot of the app.
The full Transmit 5 window unframed, filling the shot. Mac App Store (Transmit 5, id 1436522307, screenshotUrls)
Transmit: The Transmit window in icon view with image thumbnails, a floating Activity window mid-transfer ('Downloading 7 of 35 to Sites', 1.7 MB of 6.9 MB, per-file progress rings), the Inspector sidebar on the right with folder info and a Read/Write/Execute permissions matrix, and the transfer status bar at the bottom.
The Transmit window in icon view with image thumbnails, a floating Activity window mid-transfer ('Downloading 7 of 35 to Sites', 1.7 MB of 6.9 MB, per-file progress rings), the Inspector sidebar on the right with folder info and a Read/Write/Execute permissions matrix, and the transfer status bar at the bottom. Mac App Store (Transmit 5, id 1436522307, screenshotUrls)
Transmit: The Transmit window with the Sync Files sheet open: local PanicBook Pro to s3.amazonaws.com with a direction arrow, comparison options (Modification Date, delete orphaned files, follow symlinks, skip rules, time offset) and a plain-English 'Here's the plan' summary above Cancel / Simulate / Synchronize.
The Transmit window with the Sync Files sheet open. Mac App Store (Transmit 5, id 1436522307, screenshotUrls)

Images belong to their developers.

What you’re buying

Transmit is the app most Mac people reach for the first time they need to put files on a server and want it to feel like a Mac app rather than a port. Left pane local, right pane remote, drag between them, and the transfer goes at whatever speed the connection will give you — Panic pushes many streams at once, which is noticeable on a folder of a thousand small files. Places saves the connections you use constantly, and Transmit Disk mounts a server in Finder so other apps can open files on it directly.

The $45 covers Transmit 5 and its updates. Panic's record on this matters more than the licence text: this is a studio that has been shipping the same paid app since the 1990s and has never converted it to a monthly fee, and when version 5 arrived, recent version 4 buyers were moved across at no cost. Expect a paid Transmit 6 eventually, probably years out.

Two reasons not to buy it. If you upload a file a month, Cyberduck does that for nothing. And if what you actually want is a general dual-pane file manager for local disks with remote access as a bonus, ForkLift covers more ground for less.

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 give the one-time price, rather than any single feature, as the reason they buy from Panic instead of renting a rival
  • People who have used it for ten years or more describe it as the fastest and most native-feeling transfer client on the Mac, particularly on large batches

Criticised

  • Coverage gaps recur across both threads: Google Cloud Storage missing in 2017, Google Drive removed in 2024, with Cyberduck named as the client that speaks to more services
  • Several long-time users in the launch thread said S3 handling had been unreliable for years in version 4, and that it moved them to ForkLift

Details

The price in full

$45 one-time for Transmit 5, stated on Panic's own page as "Keep it forever for only $45". No subscription is offered. A free seven-day trial of the full app comes first, and people who bought Transmit 4 after roughly June 2017 were upgraded free.

The Transmit page at panic.com
The developer’s own page. panic.com, captured 22 Sep 2026
Free trial
Yes
Works offline
No
Apple Silicon
Native
On Setapp
No
Minimum macOS
not stated
Developer
Panic

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