Raycast pricing: what the free tier covers

Raycast is free to start, which makes the paid tiers harder to reason about than a straightforward paywall would be. Most people looking up the pricing are not comparing plans yet. They are trying to establish whether the features already in daily use are going to stay free.

The short version: the free tier is not a trial and does not expire. What costs money is AI, a set of numeric limits on retention and object counts, and sharing things across a team. If none of those three describe your situation, nothing is owed.

The published numbers

As listed on the pricing page on 10 September 2026, in USD:

Tier	Monthly	Annual
Free	$0	$0
Pro	$10 / month	$8 / month
Advanced AI add-on	+ $8 / month on Pro	+ $8 / month on Pro
Teams (free)	$0 / user / month	$0 / user / month
Teams Pro	$15 / user / month	$12 / user / month

Annual billing is 20 percent below monthly. Enterprise is quoted individually and no figure is published.

There is a student discount: 50 percent off Pro for verified students, with the pricing FAQ noting explicitly that it applies to Pro only and not to the Advanced AI add-on.

One structural detail that changes the arithmetic for anyone on more than one machine. Subscriptions attach to the account, not the device or the platform. A single Pro subscription covers the Mac, Windows, and iOS versions simultaneously as long as the same account is signed in. Nothing needs to be bought twice.

What the free tier actually includes

Free is not a limited demo of a paid product. It covers app and file search, clipboard history, snippets, quicklinks, the calculator, the emoji picker, window management, and hyper key. Every public extension in the store is available on it, and so is the developer tooling for building extensions of your own.

The extension store deserves emphasis because it is the part people assume must be gated. It is not. Every public extension is installable on the free tier, including ones that integrate with paid third-party services, and the developer tooling for writing extensions is free as well. Nothing about building a private workflow on top of Raycast requires a subscription.

That is the whole launcher. The daily loop of opening apps, finding files, pasting from history, and moving windows never touches a paid feature. Which is why the honest question is not "should this be upgraded" but "does anything here hit a limit", and those limits are published as numbers.

The three limits that trigger an upgrade

Clipboard history retention. Free offers 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, or 3 months. The 6 month, 1 year, and unlimited options sit on Pro. If clipboard history functions as a searchable log rather than a short buffer, this is the limit that will bite.

Raycast Notes count. Free caps notes at 5. Pro removes the cap. Five is enough for scratch use and obviously not enough if notes become a place work actually lives. The threshold is easy to test: if the fifth note gets recycled rather than kept, the cap is already shaping behaviour.

Shared objects on Teams. The free Teams tier allows 5 shared custom extensions, 30 shared quicklinks, and 30 shared snippets across the whole organisation. Beyond those counts, Teams Pro is the route.

Alongside the limits, Pro adds features outright: Raycast AI, cloud sync, the translator, custom window management commands, and custom themes.

Cloud sync is the one on that list most likely to be undervalued from a feature table. On a single machine it does nothing visible. Across a Mac, a work laptop, and an iPhone it is the difference between snippets and quicklinks being one library and being three that slowly diverge. Anyone regularly working on more than one machine should weigh it separately rather than treating it as a bullet point next to the AI features.

A trap worth flagging, because it is documented and still catches people. Upgrading to Pro does not extend clipboard retention on its own. The manual states that longer retention is not enabled automatically and that the setting has to be changed in Settings, Clipboard History, Keep history for. Subscribing and then finding nothing changed is a settings problem, not a billing one.

AI has its own published ceilings rather than being unmetered. Pro allows 50 requests per minute and 300 per hour. Advanced AI runs on a different scheme at 75 requests per 3 hours and 150 per 24 hours, with a handful of specific frontier models capped separately at 50 requests per week each. Anyone planning heavy use should read those numbers before committing rather than after.

How the billing mechanics work

The details that determine what actually gets charged and when:

A 7 day free trial, on either the monthly or the annual cycle. The first charge lands on the day the trial ends, and every subsequent charge falls on that same date each month or each year.

One trial per account, ever. Cancelling and resubscribing later starts billing immediately with no second trial. Cycling through trials is not available.

Cancellation ends auto-renewal, not access. Paid features continue until the renewal date already paid for, then the account reverts to free. It is use-it-out rather than prorated refund.

The Advanced AI add-on requires an active Pro subscription and cannot be bought alone. Its billing period is forced to match Pro, so annual Pro means annual Advanced AI.

Payment details and invoices live in account settings. Subscriptions can also be started from the iOS app, which offers a trial directly from its settings screen. The entry point makes no difference to what gets unlocked, since entitlement is per account: paying once covers every platform signed in to it.

Enterprise carries the administrative machinery rather than extra everyday features: SAML single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, extension allow-lists, IP restrictions, and centralised control over whether AI is available at all. That is an organisational purchase, priced on request, and the feature list makes clear it is aimed at companies with a security review rather than at large teams wanting a discount.

The Teams tiers, briefly

Irrelevant to solo use, worth knowing before proposing Raycast at work. The pricing FAQ states plainly that both the free individual plan and the free Teams plan may be used in organisations, including corporate environments, with no requirement to upgrade in order to use free features commercially. That answers the question most procurement conversations open with.

The free Teams tier is not a trial either. It does not expire, and it can be run indefinitely within the limits already listed: 5 shared custom extensions, 30 shared quicklinks, 30 shared snippets.

Seats have no minimum and no maximum. Users are added when needed and billed per user per month. One person can belong to any number of organisations, though the FAQ cautions against using different email addresses for different organisations, since access to shared snippets, quicklinks, and extensions depends on being signed in to the account that holds them.

Teams Pro contains everything in individual Pro plus unlimited shared objects, which is what the higher per-user figure buys. If someone already paying for individual Pro joins an organisation on Teams Pro, sort out which subscription is being kept before both renew, or the same person gets billed twice for overlapping coverage.

Budgeting for resident apps as a category

Nobody runs one resident app. The launcher, the clipboard tool, the window manager, the screenshot utility, the menu bar organiser. Each is individually cheap and the monthly total is where the real number lives. Five subscriptions at eight dollars is a line item most people have never added up, because it arrives as five small charges on different dates rather than one bill.

Two axes are worth separating when adding one more.

Where the tool sits in the day. Something touched fifty times a day and something touched twice a month do not deserve the same monthly line, regardless of how good each is.

Whether the cost recurs. A subscription keeps accruing after feature development slows, so the price paid in year three buys whatever the product happens to be then. A one-time purchase front-loads the cost and stops. Neither is automatically better, but comparing a subscription against a one-time purchase on the sticker price alone compares two different things.

There is a third cost that never shows up on any price list: assembling free tools to cover what one paid tool does creates configuration work up front and re-verification work after every OS update. That labour is real and it is invisible in a spreadsheet of monthly fees.

A concrete way to settle the Raycast question specifically, rather than reasoning about it in the abstract. Count three things over the last month:

• How many times clipboard history was searched for something copied more than three months ago.
• Whether the number of things worth keeping as notes has passed five.
• How many times an AI feature was actually invoked from inside Raycast.

Three zeros means free is correct and the decision is made. One number that is regularly non-zero justifies the subscription on its own, for that reason specifically. What does not work is reading the feature comparison and upgrading on the strength of things that sound useful, which is how a subscription ends up funding capabilities nobody opens.

Why none of this clears the menu bar

Picking a Raycast tier settles which features are available. It does nothing about how crowded the menu bar is, and the relationship arguably runs the wrong way, since every extension with a menu bar command adds another icon. Extensions are free on every tier, so the tier that costs least is also the one with no brake on how many icons accumulate.

That makes menu bar space a separate budget line with its own decision. What a menu bar manager can fold, what stays pinned, and how it behaves while resident is covered on the features page, and the approaches differ enough that the comparison page is worth reading before choosing between them. The question that matters most is what clicking a hidden icon costs: if it means expanding the bar, hunting, clicking, and collapsing again, hiding has moved the problem rather than solved it.

Check the payment model early rather than late. Subscription versus one-time purchase feeds straight into the recurrence axis above, and the pricing page settles it faster than reading a feature list does.

What to work out first

Check the three published limits against your own use: clipboard retention, note count, shared object counts. If none of them bind, staying on free is the correct answer and the only remaining question is a different one. Whether the menu bar is actually costing you time is worth answering separately, and Koffret is one way to test that without changing anything about the Raycast tier.