Every price is read, not remembered
No price on this site is written from memory or copied from another roundup. Each one is read off the developer’s own pricing, store or order page, and every entry records the URL it came from: that is the page the buy button on each app page opens. Where a developer renders the price in JavaScript we could not read, or sells only through a regional store, the entry is marked at medium or low confidence and says so. That is currently true of 1 of the 166 apps listed.
Every entry also carries the date it was last checked, printed under its buy button, and the date of the last full sweep sits at the foot of every page. Anything older than six months is flagged in amber, because a stale price presented as current is the same as a wrong one.
“Lifetime” is not one thing
Most of the confusion in this corner of the market comes from one word doing four jobs. We split it:
| Licence | What it means | For example |
|---|---|---|
| Perpetual | One payment. Updates included, indefinitely. | Final Cut Pro |
| This version | One payment buys this major version outright. The next major version is a separate purchase, if you want it. | OmniFocus 4 |
| Paid upgrades | One payment, and the developer charges for major versions on a stated cadence. | Secrets |
| Lifetime tier | Normally sold as a subscription, but a genuine one-time lifetime option exists. | Infuse |
| Freeware | No licence to buy. | Amphetamine |
| Open source | No licence to buy, and the source is public. | IINA |
An app that sells you version 5 forever, then charges again for version 6, is a perfectly honest business. It is just not the same product as one that includes updates indefinitely, and a directory that files them under the same heading is not telling you anything useful.
The catch column
Every app has a catch field, and the build fails if it is missing. It holds one clause describing what the price does not buy: major upgrades sold separately, an update window that closes, sync that needs the developer’s account, an iOS app sold apart from the Mac one, a per-device limit.
It cannot be filtered away, sorted out of view, or left blank by accident. Where the cell reads none found, that is a deliberate answer: we looked for the usual traps and did not find one. It is not the absence of a check.
The cost-over-time maths
Where an app page shows a comparison against a subscription, that rival’s price was also read from its own pricing page, at the standard individual annual rate, on the date shown. If we could not read a real number, the comparison is omitted rather than estimated. That is why many apps have no chart: an invented figure would undermine every real one on the site.
The facts beyond the price
A price on its own does not tell you whether you can actually live with an app. Every entry also records, from the vendor’s own pages: whether you must create an account with the developer to use it at all, whether it works with no internet, whether it runs natively on Apple Silicon, and how many Macs one licence covers.
Accounts, and what counts as one
The account question matters more than it sounds. A one-time purchase that cannot be opened without signing in is a different proposition from one that takes a licence key, because the account is a switch someone else controls. Note that an Apple ID needed to download from the Mac App Store does not count here — that is Apple’s account, not the developer’s. Where we could not establish an answer, the field is absent and the page says “not established” rather than guessing.
Ratings, and why most apps have none
A few app pages show a Mac App Store rating. Only 11 of the apps here do, and that is a limitation of Apple’s public API rather than a fact about the apps: it returns a rating count of zero for most macOS software, including apps whose store pages plainly show thousands of reviews. We publish the numbers we can actually read and leave the rest blank. A blank never means an app is unrated, unpopular or disliked.
What owners report
A licence is a fact; whether an app is any good is not. So rather than review anything, we read what owners actually say — on Reddit, Hacker News, MacRumors and the developers’ own forums — and record only the points that recur. One person’s opinion is not a pattern and does not appear.
How the discussions are checked
Every discussion is linked, so you can disagree with our reading of it. Each link was fetched and confirmed to resolve before it shipped, and is re-checked by a script rather than taken on trust. We do not manufacture balance: where owners are overwhelmingly positive, the criticism list is empty, and where they are not, it is not.
Where the images come from
App icons come from one of two places: the Mac App Store, looked up by the app’s exact numeric id, or the developer’s own website. Nothing is matched by name search alone — searching for one app returns another with a similar name, and a wrong icon is as misleading as a wrong price. Images that are not square are rejected as marketing banners, and a maintainer’s personal avatar is never used as an app’s icon. Where we could not source one confidently, you get a plain lettered placeholder rather than a borrowed picture.
Screenshots, and who owns them
Screenshots are either published by the developer through the Mac App Store, or are our own capture of the developer’s page, taken on the date shown beneath it. Each one is credited with its source. These images belong to their developers, not to us; if you are a developer and would rather we did not show yours, say so and it comes down.
What we do not do
- No affiliate links. Nothing on this site pays us if you buy. Outbound links carry
nofollow. - No tracking, and no cookie banner. We count page views with Fathom, which sets no cookies, stores no personal data and cannot follow you to another site. We can see that a page was read. We cannot see who read it. That is the whole reason there is nothing to click away when you arrive.
- No sponsored placement. Ordering is alphabetical or by the column you sort on. Where we are not a neutral party — one app here is made by the person who runs this site — the app’s page says so, at the top, before anything good is said about it. It is held to the same test and gets no advantage in ranking, ordering or styling.
- No scores or stars, and no reviews. We record facts about licences, not opinions about quality. Where an app page shows what owners praise or criticise, that is a report of what recurs across real discussions — every one of them linked on the page for you to go and judge yourself — and not our verdict. The build refuses to publish either list without sources behind it.
- No subscription-only apps. If the only way to pay is monthly, it does not belong here.
Where we are likely to be wrong
Prices change without announcement, regional pricing differs from the US figures we quote, sales and bundles come and go, and a developer can move to a subscription at any time. Treat this site as a well-researched starting point and the developer’s page as the authority. Always confirm on their site before paying.
If you find something wrong, the fastest fix is to say so — see submitting a correction. Lifetime Mac is a static site built from plain text files, so a correction is a small change and ships quickly.