Rectangle pricing: what the free tier covers

Rectangle shows up on every list of Mac window managers, usually described as free. Then the download page mentions Rectangle Pro, the Pro page shows a price, and the obvious question follows: which parts cost money, and does the free version quietly stop at some point.

It does not. The line is cleaner than most freemium apps: Rectangle and Rectangle Pro are two separate applications from the same developer. Rectangle is free and open source with no trial period, no device cap and no locked features. Rectangle Pro is a one time purchase at 9.99 US dollars, listed at 1,564 yen including tax for buyers in Japan as of 10 September 2026. There is no subscription on either side. What follows is where the split sits, what the licence actually permits, and the one cost that never appears on a pricing page.

Two apps, not two tiers

Rectangle is distributed under the MIT licence with its source on GitHub. It can be downloaded from the official site, pulled from the releases page, or installed with Homebrew. Nothing expires, nothing is watermarked, and no feature is greyed out waiting for a licence key. Donations and GitHub sponsorship exist, and both are optional.

Rectangle Pro is sold through Paddle, an online reseller, rather than through the Mac App Store. The purchase is a single payment. Two conditions attach to it. The app runs for 10 days before a licence is required, and one licence can be active on 3 devices at a time. A fourth Mac means deactivating one of the first three.

The two apps also keep separate settings. The free app stores its preferences under the bundle identifier com.knollsoft.Rectangle, while Pro uses com.knollsoft.Hookshot. That separation makes it practical to install both and compare them directly. The one thing to watch is keyboard shortcuts: if both apps hold the same combination, the result depends on which registered it last, so quit one while testing the other.

What the free app covers

The official comparison page lists the two apps side by side. Checked on 10 September 2026, the free app includes everything below.

Capability	Rectangle	Rectangle Pro
Keyboard shortcuts for window positions	Yes	Yes
Drag a window to a screen edge to snap	Yes	Yes
Trigger a window action from the menu bar menu	Yes	Yes
Halves, quarters, thirds, fourths, sixths	Yes	Yes
Maximize, almost maximize, maximize height, center, restore	Yes	Yes
Todo mode, keeping one app permanently visible	Yes	Yes
Choosing which action each snap area performs	Yes	Yes
Reserving room for the Stage Manager strip	Yes	Yes
Open source	Yes	No

For most people that list is the whole job. Left half, right half, maximize, and a repeat press to cycle a window through one half, two thirds and one third: all of it sits in the free app. Support goes back further too. The free app runs on macOS 10.15 and later, while the Pro page states macOS 13.5 as its minimum. On an older Mac, the operating system requirement decides the question before the price does.

There is also a layer of configuration that never appears in the settings window. A published list of terminal commands covers gaps between windows, margins at screen edges, what a repeated shortcut does, and how the snap footprint is drawn. None of it is held back for paying users.

What Rectangle Pro adds

The paid features cluster in two directions. One is speed, replacing memorised key combinations with cursor movement. The other is portability, carrying a layout or a configuration between machines and sessions.

• Window Throw, Long Throw and Quick Throw, which position a window by holding a modifier and moving the cursor
• Custom sizes and positions defined by the user, each bound to its own shortcut with configurable behaviour on repeat
• Saved workspaces that restore several applications at once, optionally triggered when a display is connected
• Stashing a window just off screen, sliding it back when the cursor touches that edge
• iCloud sync for settings
• Fill left and fill right, plus Windows style arrow key shortcuts
• Multi window commands: tile, cascade, and moving every window of an app to another display

Two of those deserve a closer look, because they are the ones people underestimate from a feature list. The throw gestures replace the memorisation problem entirely: instead of learning a dozen key combinations, the same modifier plus a short cursor movement addresses sixteen positions, and it works on a window that is not currently focused. Saved workspaces solve a different problem, the one that appears every time a laptop is undocked and redocked and three applications have to be dragged back into position by hand.

Read that list against the last week of actual work. Someone who rebuilds the same three window layout every time a monitor is plugged in gets real time back. Someone who presses two shortcuts a day does not. The price is small enough that it will not be the deciding factor either way, so let the feature list decide instead.

The terms matter more than the number

At this price, comparing 9.99 dollars against some other tool's 12 dollars is not a useful exercise. Three details are worth more attention than the number itself.

Device count. Three concurrent activations is generous for personal use and tight for anyone who also has a work machine, a personal laptop and a test Mac. Check it before buying rather than after. Deactivating an old machine is normally possible, but it is easier to do while that machine still boots than after it has been wiped and traded in.

Where the receipt lands. Because the sale runs through a reseller rather than the App Store, the purchase does not appear in an Apple ID purchase history. The receipt arrives by email, which matters if the cost is going on an expense claim. A refund policy is published separately on the vendor site.

Major version upgrades. One time purchase in this category usually means one major version. Developers fund the work of keeping up with each new macOS by charging for the next major release. Assume another payment every few years rather than never, and the total stops surprising anyone.

How each version arrives and updates

Installation route changes very little about price and quite a lot about maintenance. The free app can be downloaded as a disk image from the official site or the GitHub releases page, or installed with a single Homebrew cask command. Both routes deliver the same application, and both check for their own updates once running.

The Homebrew route has one wrinkle worth knowing in advance, because it surfaces much later. The project documentation notes that settings can fail to persist across restarts for some Homebrew installations, and the fix is to reinstall using the zap flag so the old preference entries are cleared out first. That is a five minute problem if the cause is known and a frustrating afternoon if it is not.

Updates for the paid app arrive the same way, through the app itself, and a licence key entered once carries across versions within the same major release. Keeping the licence email findable is therefore part of the purchase. On a machine rebuild, the app is a two minute reinstall and the licence key is the part that is easy to lose.

Confirming the tool is still alive

Price is the easy thing to check. Four other things move more often and matter more: whether the product has shut down, whether new purchases have been closed, whether ownership has changed hands, and whether pricing has been revised. None of them appear next to the price.

For Rectangle, as of 10 September 2026: the repository has been public since 2019, version 1.100 shipped on 26 August 2026, and commits continued into early September. No end of life or suspension notice appears on the official site. Development sits with an individual developer, with a reseller handling payment.

This check is worth repeating for any menu bar resident, not just this one. These utilities work by driving other applications through macOS accessibility APIs, which is exactly the layer Apple changes between major releases. An app that stopped being updated eighteen months ago will usually keep working until the autumn OS release, then stop. Release cadence tells more about the next two years than any feature table.

The menu bar slot is part of the price

Every resident utility charges rent in a place no pricing page mentions. Rectangle places one icon in the menu bar, and that icon is genuinely useful early on: the menu lists every window action by name, which is how most people learn the shortcuts in the first place.

The trouble is cumulative. Ten apps installed on the same reasoning fill the bar, and on a MacBook with a notch the overflow simply disappears rather than compressing. At that point the icon that helped during week one is competing with a VPN client, a sync client and a screen recorder for space that has run out.

Rectangle has its own answer built in. The settings window includes an option to hide the menu bar icon. Relaunching the app from the Applications folder still opens settings afterwards, so nothing becomes unreachable. What is lost is the menu itself, which is a poor trade until the shortcuts are memorised.

It is worth counting the real cost of that slot before deciding. A menu bar holds a fixed number of icons before macOS starts dropping the ones furthest left, and unlike a Dock it does not scroll, compress or spill onto a second row. Every resident app that claims a permanent slot is therefore taking one away from something else, and the apps that get pushed out are usually the ones whose icons carry status: a recording indicator, a sync state, a battery reading from an external device.

The broader answer is to manage the whole bar rather than switching icons off one app at a time. What separates these tools is how a hidden icon behaves when it is needed again: whether it must be revealed first, or whether it stays clickable in place. That behaviour is described on Features, and the way the approaches differ is laid out on How it compares. Common questions about hiding and restoring icons are collected on the FAQ.

What to change first

Install the free app and use it for a week before considering anything paid, because for a large share of users the free app is the finished answer. Separately, decide how many icons the menu bar is allowed to hold, and hide the rest with a dedicated tool rather than hunting for a setting inside every app: Koffret does that part, leaving Rectangle to do windows.