Clipboard Manager for Mac Without a Subscription
The Mac clipboard holds exactly one thing. Copy a second item and the first is quietly gone. Every clipboard manager fixes that; what separates them is what you pay, and what happens to your history if you stop.
This page is written by the developer of SuperClip, so read it accordingly. Where another app is the better purchase, it says so.
The short version
If you want your clipboard on your iPhone as well as your Mac, buy Paste and stop reading. Nothing below syncs. If you do not need that, you should not be paying a yearly fee for clipboard history.
Paste — $29.99 a year, or $89.99 once
The one everybody compares against. $29.99 a year, or $89.99 for a lifetime licence; monthly billing works out dearer. Needs macOS 14 or later. It syncs through iCloud across Mac, iPhone and iPad, organises clips into named Pinboards rather than one flat list, and has the best-looking browser of anything here. Version 6.6.10 is recent, so it is well maintained.
The question worth asking before a subscription: what happens if you stop paying? Paste states that your clipboard history is retained and that you can access it again on purchasing another plan. It does not state that you can read or export it in the meantime. If years of clips matter to you, get that in writing from their support before you commit.
The lifetime licence sidesteps the whole question and breaks even against the annual price in three years.
Maccy — free, MIT licensed, actively developed
Free and open source under the MIT licence, macOS 14 or higher, and genuinely well maintained. No account, no telemetry, no cloud. Keyboard-first search over your history, pins, configurable history size, installable through Homebrew.
It is deliberately the minimal option: no sync, no pinboards, no iOS app. For a lot of people that is the correct trade and the right answer is to install Maccy and spend nothing.
Raycast — free, with a three-month ceiling
Clipboard history is one of Raycast's free core features, alongside its launcher, snippets and window management. The catch is retention: the free tier keeps three months, and unlimited history is a paid plan. If you already live in Raycast, you probably already have this and do not need another app.
Alfred — £34, and capped by design
Clipboard history is a Powerpack feature, so it needs the paid upgrade: £34 for a licence locked to version 5, or £59 for the Mega Supporter tier with free upgrades to all future versions. macOS 10.14 or later, and still supporting Intel, which makes it the only realistic option on genuinely old hardware.
Alfred does two things nothing else here does: hold Command and double-tap C to append a selection to what you already copied, and press Command-S to turn any clip into a saved snippet with text expansion. Its clipboard is also disabled by default for privacy reasons, which is the right default.
Its limit is retention: the options are 24 hours, 7 days, 1 month or 3 months. There is no unlimited setting.
Where SuperClip fits
SuperClip is $2.99, once. Text, images, links and files, searchable, in the menu bar, opened from any app with Command-Shift-V.
Three things about it are deliberate. The history never leaves the machine — there is no syncing and no cloud backup, which is a limitation if you wanted sync and the entire point if you did not. It does not ask for Accessibility permission, because it copies the item to your clipboard for you to paste rather than pasting on your behalf. And it skips entries your password manager marks as concealed or temporary, so passwords do not land in the history in the first place.
Every item shows when it was copied and which app it came from, with separate filters for Text, Images, Links and Files, pins for the things you paste all day, and Command-1 to Command-9 for the top of the list.
It runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later — a version lower than Paste, Maccy and Copy 'Em, which all require macOS 14. If you are on Ventura and staying there, that matters. Universal build for Apple silicon and Intel, 2.1 MB. One licence, personal and client work, forever.
So, which one
You need iPhone sync: Paste. Take the $89.99 lifetime rather than the yearly fee.
You want to spend nothing: Maccy, or Raycast if you already use it and three months of history is enough.
You want text expansion and clip merging: Alfred's Powerpack.
You want local-only history on Ventura for the price of a coffee: SuperClip is $2.99 on 1dot1.
Prices and system requirements were checked on 19 September 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Paste's position on cancelled subscriptions is quoted from its own pricing and help pages; it is not spelled out further there.