Maccy pricing: what the free tier covers

Looking up the price of this clipboard manager produces two answers, which is why the question keeps getting asked. The vendor site offers a purchase button next to a free download, and both lead to the same application. That is unusual enough that the normal way of reading a pricing page, find the feature the paid tier unlocks, does not work here. There is no unlocked feature.

What follows is the state of the two routes as of 10 September 2026, taken from the vendor site, the App Store listing and the Homebrew cask definition. The useful conclusion is not a number. It is that the decision turns on how updates arrive and how the download is verified, not on what the software can do.

Two ways in, one price tag

The App Store listing sells this app for 1,500 yen in the Japanese store and 9.99 US dollars in the American one. It is a one time purchase. There is no monthly plan, no annual plan, and no in app purchase attached to it.

The other route costs nothing. The source is published on GitHub under the MIT license, builds are attached to the release page, and Homebrew carries a cask:

brew install --cask maccy

The vendor site states the position directly:

Maccy is an open source application using the MIT license. It is and will always be free.

So the free option is not a trial, not a limited edition, and not a version that stops working after a period. The paid listing and the free download both report version 2.7.1. Anyone treating the free route as the demo and the paid route as the real product has the relationship backwards.

The paid build does not add features

The App Store description ends with the reason the listing exists. After the bullet points about speed, keyboard operation, privacy and customisation, it states that the source code is available on GitHub under the MIT license and that this version is being sold on the App Store to support the development. No upgrade path is described, because there is nothing above it.

Comparing the two descriptions confirms it. The feature list on the App Store covers full text search across the history, keyboard only operation, passwords not being logged when a password manager clears them from the clipboard, all data staying on the machine, configuration through preferences, and automation through Shortcuts actions. The vendor site attributes the same set to the free build. Neither list contains an item marked as exclusive to one route.

The removal footprint is the same too, which is a quiet confirmation that the binaries match. Both routes install a sandboxed app with the bundle identifier org.p0deje.Maccy, and both keep settings and history in ~/Library/Containers/org.p0deje.Maccy. A paid build with extra capability would need entitlements the free one lacks, and there is no sign of any.

What the free route costs instead

Zero on the invoice does not mean zero effort. Two differences are real, and both are about process rather than capability.

The first is verification. A purchase through the App Store is delivered by Apple, which removes the question of whether the download is genuine. The free route puts that question back on the person downloading, and the vendor site treats it as a live risk rather than a theoretical one:

Beware of fake websites impersonating Maccy. maccy.app is the only official website.

A clipboard manager is an unusually attractive thing to impersonate, because everything typed into a password field and then copied passes through it. The practical rule is to collect the free build from the official site, the project release page, or Homebrew, and from nowhere else. A build from a download aggregator that appeared high in search results does not qualify.

The second is how updates arrive. The App Store copy updates the way every App Store app does, through the same queue as everything else, and the Homebrew cask is marked as an app that updates itself, using the project's Sparkle feed. Both work. They fail differently. An App Store update can sit waiting behind an Apple Account that needs reauthentication, while a self updating app depends on its own update check succeeding and on the person clicking through the prompt. Neither problem is a price, but both are the kind of thing that decides which route suits a particular machine.

	App Store	Direct download	Homebrew
Price	1,500 yen / 9.99 USD	Free	Free
Version as of 10 Sep 2026	2.7.1	2.7.1	2.7.1
Verification	Handled by Apple	Check the source	Cask checksum
Updates	App Store queue	Built in update check	Built in update check
Receipt for expenses	Yes	No	No

The last row is the one that decides it for some people. A company that reimburses software needs a record of a transaction, and a free download does not produce one. Paying 1,500 yen for something obtainable at no cost is rational when the alternative is an unreimbursable hour of paperwork.

What the 1,500 yen is actually buying

Since the paid build adds nothing, the purchase is a contribution with a download attached. That makes the relevant question not what the money unlocks but whether the project it supports is alive, and that is something the public record answers.

The repository was created in January 2018, which makes this a project with several years behind it rather than a recent release. The current version 2.7.1 was published on 10 August 2026, one month before the date of this article, and commits continued after it. Roughly 21,700 people have starred the repository. None of those figures prove anything about the next release, but together they describe a project that is being worked on rather than one parked in place.

That matters for a tool of this kind more than for most. A clipboard manager reads what the system puts on the pasteboard, and the pasteboard is exactly the sort of interface that changes between macOS releases. The pattern to watch for is a tool that works today and then stops after an autumn system update, with nobody available to adjust it. A project with a release a month old is in a different position from one whose last build predates two macOS versions.

Read that way, the choice between the two routes is not really free against paid. It is whether to contribute to the maintenance that keeps the free option viable. Nothing obliges anyone to, and the license explicitly does not. It is a reasonable thing to weigh at 1,500 yen.

Using it on more than one Mac

An App Store purchase is attached to the Apple Account that made it, so the app can be installed on the Macs signed into that account without paying again. The free route needs no accounting at all: the same build is downloaded, or the same Homebrew command is run, on each machine.

Either way, settings and history do not travel. Both routes keep everything in the local container, and nothing is synced between machines. A second Mac starts with an empty history, which for a tool holding copied passwords and tokens is the safer default even though it means configuring shortcut keys twice.

The requirement that settles it before price does

Before either number matters, there is a compatibility floor. The vendor site states that macOS Sonoma 14 or higher is required, and the App Store listing gives the same minimum of 14.0. The Homebrew cask declares a Sonoma dependency as well.

On a Mac still running Ventura or older, neither route works, and the price comparison is moot. That situation is more common than it sounds, because the machines most likely to have a crowded menu bar are the ones that have been in service the longest. Checking the installed version first, under the Apple menu and About This Mac, avoids paying for something that will not launch.

The installed size is small enough to be irrelevant to the decision. The App Store listing puts the download at roughly 2.4 MB. What that number does say is something about scope. This is a tool that keeps a copy history and does not attempt to also manage snippets, sync across devices or store images at scale. Tools that do those things are larger and priced differently, often on a subscription, and comparing their prices against this one compares different amounts of product.

The cost that never appears on a price list

There is a third column no pricing page lists, which is a menu bar slot. Every resident app that shows an icon takes one, and the row has a fixed width that shrinks further on a laptop with a notch. Once the row fills, items past the edge simply stop being drawn, and the app that vanishes is not the least important one. It is whichever one happens to sort last.

That is the cost a clipboard manager adds regardless of which route paid for it. It is also the cost of the password manager, the cloud storage client, the backup agent, the meeting app and the input switcher, none of which asked permission either. The number of slots occupied grows every time a tool is installed, and nothing in the system reclaims them.

One consequence is specific to a tool bought rather than downloaded. Paying for something creates a mild reluctance to hide it, because the icon feels like the thing that was purchased. The icon is not the product. The history and the search are, and both are reached by a keyboard shortcut whether the icon is visible or not. This app can be configured to keep no menu bar icon at all, which is worth knowing before the row is rearranged around it.

Sorting the row by click frequency is what turns that from a complaint into a decision. Most rows separate into items clicked several times a day, items looked at for status and clicked occasionally, and items never clicked at all. The third group is usually the largest. Everything in it could be hidden without losing anything, and for tools that cannot be removed at all, such as software a workplace requires, hiding is the only available move. Whether hiding holds up depends on one detail: whether a hidden icon can still be clicked and its menu opened without expanding the row first. If retrieving an icon costs extra steps every time, the original layout returns within a week.

What to change first

Check the macOS version, then pick the route on process rather than price: the App Store if a receipt or Apple handled verification is worth 1,500 yen, the free download otherwise. Once it is installed, sort the whole menu bar row by click frequency and hide the group that never gets clicked, which is the job Koffret exists to do. The supported macOS range and the current build are on the download page, and how it compares sets out what different tools can still reach while collapsed.