Is ClipHistory actually free?

No. It is $19.99 as a one-time payment with a 12-month license and no auto-renewal. If you want a genuinely free option, Maccy is open source but more minimal.

Does ClipHistory charge a yearly subscription like Paste?

No. It is a one-time purchase. The 12-month license does not auto-renew; nothing is charged again unless you choose to.

Can I use Paste's board workflow in ClipHistory?

Yes. ClipHistory has boards for grouping clips and snippets for reusable text, covering the most common Paste workflows.

Do my clips get synced to the cloud?

No. Everything stays local on your Mac. The only outbound calls happen when you run an AI transform, which goes directly to your chosen provider.

A Clipboard App Like Paste, Without a Subscription

If you have looked at Paste, you know it is a polished clipboard manager with a visual board layout and pinboards. The thing that sends people searching for alternatives is usually the same: it is a subscription. A lot of Mac users would rather pay once than be billed every year for a utility that runs in the background.

The honest part first: there is no truly free clipboard app that matches Paste feature-for-feature and stays maintained. Free options like Maccy exist, but they are minimal by design. If you specifically want the "board of cards" experience plus reusable snippets, you are choosing between paid tools. ClipHistory is one of them, and its pricing model is the main difference.

The subscription vs. one-time distinction

ClipHistory costs $19.99 as a one-time payment. It comes with a 12-month license and no auto-renewal — nothing charges your card again unless you decide to buy another term. For someone who resents recurring charges on a background utility, that is the entire appeal.

If you want zero cost, Maccy is the answer, but it does not do boards, snippets, or AI transforms. So the realistic comparison is "subscription vs. pay-once," not "paid vs. free."

Feature overlap with Paste

ClipHistory covers the parts of Paste that most people actually use day to day:

Clipboard history with a board view

ClipHistory keeps your recent clips and lets you organize them into boards — grouped collections for a given project or context. Open the window with Cmd+Shift+V, search, and paste.

Snippets

Save reusable text — signatures, templates, code blocks — as snippets you can drop in anywhere. This is the pinboard-style behavior many people rely on in Paste.

Paste stack

Queue several clips and paste them in sequence. Handy for filling forms or assembling structured content.

What ClipHistory adds that Paste does not

AI transforms with your own key

ClipHistory connects to five providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint — using your own API key. You can summarize, rewrite, translate, or clean up any clip right in the window. Because the key is yours, you pay the provider directly with no markup, and there is no ClipHistory account to create.

What about my data?

ClipHistory keeps everything local. No cloud sync, no account, no clips leaving your Mac — except when you explicitly run an AI transform, which calls only the provider whose key you supplied. If avoiding cloud storage of your clipboard is part of why you want an alternative, this is worth weighing.

The honest recommendation

If you want no cost at all and only need history, use Maccy and skip the boards.
If you want Paste-style boards and snippets but hate subscriptions, ClipHistory's one-time $19.99 license is the closer fit.
If you also want AI transforms on your clips with your own API key, ClipHistory adds that on top.

The capacity is concrete: ClipHistory keeps 150 unpinned clips plus unlimited pinned ones, so the items you mark as important never roll off the list.

Ready to try it? Get ClipHistory for macOS ($19.99) — a one-time payment, 12-month license, no auto-renewal. Signed and notarized by Apple, runs on macOS 12+ (Apple Silicon and Intel).