One Switch pricing: what the free tier covers

A trial counter has appeared in the One Switch panel and a decision is now due. The complication is that this app does not split free from paid by feature. It splits by time, and the paid side then splits again by how many Macs the licence covers.

Everything below was checked on 10 September 2026 against the vendor's published pages and against the shipping application bundle. Prices move, so the value here is knowing which lines to read rather than memorising a figure.

The free tier is seven days, not a reduced feature set

There is no comparison table on the vendor's site marking features as free or paid, because there is no cut-down free build. The published answer is a seven day trial with no prepayment and no card required. During those seven days everything works.

That changes the question being asked. With a free tier, the decision is whether the free features cover the need. With a trial, the decision is whether seven days is enough to find out what gets used.

The shipping bundle contains a switch manifest listing 26 switches. Nine of them are enabled on first launch: Hide Desktop Icons, Dark Mode, Keep Awake, Screen Saver, Headphones Connect, Do Not Disturb, Night Shift, True Tone, and Screen Clean. The other seventeen sit in the Customize panel waiting to be dragged in.

Seventeen extras is more than anyone will evaluate properly in a week. A workable approach is to leave the default nine alone for two or three days, note which ones actually get clicked, then spend the remaining days adding the specific extras that look relevant. Stage Manager, Mute Microphone, Show Hidden Files, Lock Keyboard, Empty Trash, Eject Disk, Empty Clipboard, Hide Dock, Low Power Mode, Screen Resolution, and Xcode Cache Clean are all in that second group. A switch never opened during the trial is a switch that will not be opened after payment either.

What happens when the seven days run out

The app does not quietly degrade at the end of the trial. It puts up a screen that says the free trial has ended, and offers a fixed set of choices: Activate, Purchase, Restore, and Quit. Before that point, the same panel counts down, showing how many days of trial remain.

Activate is the path for anyone who already holds a key. It takes two fields, an email address and a licence key, and reports back that the licence is activated when it succeeds.

Restore is the path for anyone who bought previously and is setting up a new machine or a reinstalled system. When there is nothing to find, it says so plainly, reporting that no purchase record is available to restore. That message is worth reading literally rather than as a failure: it usually means the purchase was made under a different email address, or through the subscription bundle rather than directly.

Quit is a real option, not a dead end. Nothing about the trial ending damages the switches that were configured. Those settings sit in the app's own preferences and are picked up again if a licence is entered later, so there is no penalty for letting the trial lapse while deciding.

The one thing that does not happen is a reduced free mode. There is no state in which the app keeps running with fewer switches. Either it is licensed or it is asking to be.

Three price tiers, split by device count

The purchase panel lists three options. Prices as displayed on 10 September 2026:

Licence	Price	Discount shown	Per device
1 Device License	$4.99	none	$4.99
2 Devices License	$7.99	Save 10%	about $4.00
5 Devices License (Family Package)	$16.99	Save 32%	about $3.40

Payment is by PayPal or credit card. The transaction itself runs through a payment processor: the vendor's download page loads Paddle, and the Paddle framework ships inside the application bundle. That matters for one practical reason. Receipts, refund requests, and billing questions go to the processor's buyer portal rather than to the developer directly.

A separate Chinese storefront is listed on the same page, priced from 29 CNY. From outside China the US dollar prices are the ones that apply.

The tier choice is worth a moment of thought because there is no published path to add a seat later. The gap between one device and two is three dollars. Anyone likely to run a second Mac inside the next couple of years is choosing between three dollars now and buying the whole thing again later.

Setapp is a fourth entry point with different arithmetic

The vendor's page also offers the app through Setapp, a subscription bundle. Setapp's own published rates on 10 September 2026:

Plan	Monthly, before tax	Free trial
Mac	$14.99	7 days
Mac + iOS	$18.99	7 days
Power User	$22.99	7 days

Set against a $4.99 one time licence, a single month of the cheapest subscription costs three times the app. No one should subscribe to a bundle for this app alone. The arithmetic only turns the other way when several other wanted apps are in the same catalogue, in which case the marginal cost of adding this one is zero.

The honest test is to count how many apps in the bundle catalogue are already on a wishlist. Two or fewer, and buying each outright is cheaper. Five or more, and the subscription starts to make sense on its own terms, with this app arriving as a side effect rather than a reason.

The same one time versus recurring question comes up across this whole category of small utilities, and a side by side of how these tools charge is a faster way to see the pattern than opening five vendor pages in sequence.

Seats move between Macs, but only if released first

Activation takes an email address and a licence key, entered in the app's License panel. Two other controls sit in the same panel: Deactivate License, and Deactivate All Devices.

When a key that is already in use gets entered again, the app explains that the code has been used and suggests choosing Deactivate All Devices to release the current activations before trying again. So seats are fixed at purchase, but their assignment is not permanent.

The practical sequence:

• Before selling or wiping a Mac, open the License panel and deactivate on that machine
• If the machine is already gone, use Deactivate All Devices from a machine still in hand, then reactivate everywhere
• Two Macs used for separate work and personal setups consume two seats, not one

Nothing here is unrecoverable. The cost of forgetting is having to reactivate every other machine once.

Three conditions to confirm before paying

Three details are easier to check now than to discover afterwards.

The macOS floor

The vendor's page states macOS Monterey (12) or higher near the top, while a line further down the same page still reads macOS Big Sur (11) or higher. The shipping bundle settles it: the minimum system version recorded in the app is 12.0. Anyone buying for an older machine should verify before paying.

Intel licences do not carry over

The app ships a dedicated notice titled "This license does not apply to the current version". Its text explains that a licence bought for the Intel build uses a different licensing mechanism, that the functionality is identical, and that moving to the current build requires contacting the developer through Send Feedback. Long time users upgrading hardware should expect to go through that route rather than simply pasting the old key.

No student pricing

The vendor's published FAQ states that a student discount is not offered at the moment.

For completeness, the build checked was version 1.35.4, distributed as a universal binary covering both Intel and Apple Silicon, signed and notarised under the developer identity Hangzhou Tulading Technology Co., Ltd.

What the price is actually buying

At $4.99 the number is rarely the obstacle. The real question is whether a permanent menu bar slot is worth spending on this. On a bar that is already full, that slot has a cost of its own, which is the problem a separate category of app exists to solve. The feature list of a menu bar organizer shows the shape of that other approach: icons move behind a divider and come back on demand rather than competing for width all day.

Several of the nine default switches duplicate controls that macOS already exposes. Dark Mode, Do Not Disturb, and Night Shift all sit in Control Center, roughly two clicks away. If those three are the main draw, the app is buying convenience measured in single clicks.

The seventeen optional switches are where the case gets stronger, because most of them have no two click equivalent. Emptying the clipboard, locking the keyboard for a wipe down, hiding widgets, clearing Xcode derived data, and forcing a specific screen resolution are all multi step operations otherwise. Two or three of those in daily use justify the price without much argument.

One caveat applies after purchase rather than before it. Low Power Mode and Energy Mode are driven by a privileged helper that the app installs separately, which means an administrator password prompt the first time either is used. That is a setup step, not a licensing one, but it arrives right after payment.

There is a second way to read the value, which is per press rather than per feature. The app records usage, counting how often each switch has been toggled, and that count is visible inside the app. Anyone unsure whether the licence earned its money can open that screen after a month and look at the numbers instead of guessing. A switch sitting at zero after four weeks of daily use is a switch that should come out of the panel, and if all of them read close to zero, the answer to the pricing question has already been given.

The switches also differ in how much they save. Toggling Dark Mode saves perhaps two clicks. Locking the keyboard so a screen can be wiped down, or emptying the clipboard after pasting a password, replaces sequences that most people otherwise do not bother with at all. The value is concentrated in that second kind, which is precisely the kind that has to be added manually in the Customize tab rather than arriving switched on.

What to change first

Before paying, spend one of the remaining trial days in the Customize panel adding the switches that have no Control Center equivalent, and see whether two of them survive the week. If the answer is yes, pick the device tier for the Macs of the next two years rather than today's, since seats cannot be topped up later. If the answer is no, the menu bar slot is the thing to reclaim rather than the licence to buy, and Koffret shows how a tool built for that job is priced.