TextExpander, the keyboard utility that turns short abbreviations into longer blocks of text, now has a free plan. The company confirmed the change to 9to5Mac on Thursday, opening up its core Snippets feature to anyone willing to live within a few limits.
The Free plan includes five active snippets, unlimited storage for a snippet library, unlimited expansions once a snippet is set up, and room for up to five team members. It works across Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows and Chrome, with the same library syncing across all of them.
That's the pitch TextExpander has always made: type a short string, like an email signoff or a support reply, and watch it expand into a paragraph you'd otherwise retype a dozen times a day. The app has built a following among people who answer the same questions over and over, customer support reps, podcasters prepping show notes, anyone who fields sponsorship requests or form replies on a loop.
The catch is the number five. Swapping out an active snippet for a different one is limited to once every two weeks on the free tier, so this isn't built for people who rewrite their shortcut list daily. It's built for people who lean on a handful of fixed phrases and want to see if the habit sticks before paying for more room.
Apple has been closing the gap here. MacOS has its own text replacement settings buried in System Settings, and they've gotten more capable over recent updates. What TextExpander still offers that Apple's native tool doesn't, according to the company, is variable support, conditional sections that change text based on context, nested snippets that call other snippets, and math macros that can calculate values inside a replacement. For anyone whose shortcuts are simple, swapping in a few of those into macOS directly might be enough. For anyone building out a real library, encountering those five-snippet ceiling is likely the nudge toward a paid tier.
TextExpander hasn't published updated details on what its paid plans cost or how many snippets they unlock beyond the free tier, and the company didn't share pricing specifics in its comments to 9to5Mac. The free plan is live now and can be set up through TextExpander's own site, with the snippet library syncing the moment it's installed on a second device.
For a tool that's spent years behind a subscription wall, letting people in for free is as much an onboarding move as a pricing one. Whether five snippets is enough to convert casual typists into paying teams is the open question TextExpander is now testing in public.
SDFiled by The Software Desk
Apps, platforms, operating system releases, security fixes and the features arriving in them.
More from this desk →
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.