Yes. The open-source version of Maccy is free and handles core clipboard history. There's also a paid App Store version that adds iCloud sync, pinned items, and convenience features.

Does ClipHistory sync between Macs like paid Maccy?

No. ClipHistory keeps everything local on a single Mac with no cloud or account. Its focus is on AI transforms, snippets, and boards rather than cross-device sync.

How much does ClipHistory cost?

ClipHistory is a one-time $19.99 payment for a 12-month license, with no auto-renewal.

Maccy Pro vs Free: What You Actually Get

Q: Do I need an AI subscription to use ClipHistory's AI features?

You bring your own API key from one of five providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint). Requests go directly from your Mac to that provider.

Maccy is a well-known open-source clipboard manager for macOS, and a common question is what the paid version adds over the free build. This guide walks through both, then looks at where a different approach—local AI transforms with your own API key—fits in.

The free version of Maccy

The free, open-source Maccy does the core job of a clipboard manager well. You get a searchable history of your copied text and images, a keyboard shortcut to open the popup, fuzzy search across past clips, and a configurable history size. It runs locally and stores everything on your Mac. For a lot of people, this is genuinely all they need.

What you don't get in the free build is anything beyond storage and retrieval. There are no snippets, no organization into groups, and no text processing. It's a fast, focused history list—nothing more, nothing less.

What the paid version adds

The paid version of Maccy (sold on the Mac App Store) adds polish and a few convenience features on top of the open-source core: iCloud sync between your own Macs, pinned items, and some quality-of-life settings. The pitch is essentially "the same tool, plus sync and a few extras, with App Store updates."

If you live across two Macs and want your clipboard to follow you, that sync is the main reason to pay. If you only use one machine, the free build covers most of the same ground.

Where the comparison gets interesting

A clipboard manager that only stores and retrieves is solving half the problem. The other half is what you do with the text after you paste it. That's where ClipHistory takes a different angle.

ClipHistory keeps the same fundamentals you'd expect: a global shortcut (Cmd+Shift+V), a searchable history of 150 unpinned clips plus unlimited pinned clips, and everything stored locally with no account and no cloud. But it adds a layer most clipboard managers skip entirely.

Built-in AI transforms

ClipHistory connects to five AI providers—Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint—using your own API key. That means you can summarize a long block of copied text, rewrite it in a different tone, translate it, or clean up messy formatting, all from the clipboard popup. The key stays on your machine, and the requests go directly to the provider you chose.

This is the practical difference: instead of copying text, pasting it into a separate tool, transforming it, and copying it back, you do the whole loop in one place.

Snippets, boards, and paste stack

ClipHistory also includes reusable snippets for text you type often, boards to group related clips, and a paste stack for queuing several items and pasting them in order. These are organization features that the free Maccy doesn't have and the paid Maccy only partially covers.

Privacy and ownership

Both tools store data locally, which is a real strength compared to cloud-based clipboard tools. ClipHistory goes a step further on the AI side: because you bring your own API key, there's no middleman service holding your data or your usage. Everything—history, snippets, settings—stays on your Mac. There's no ClipHistory account to create.

ClipHistory is also signed and notarized by Apple and ships as a universal binary, so it runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs running macOS 12 or later.

How to choose

Here's a simple way to think about it:

You want a free, fast, single-machine history list: the free Maccy is a solid pick.
You want clipboard sync across your own Macs and prefer App Store updates: the paid Maccy makes sense.
You want history plus snippets, boards, and AI transforms that run with your own API key and stay local: ClipHistory covers that combination.

There's no universal winner here—it depends on whether you treat the clipboard as storage or as a small workspace where text also gets reshaped. If the latter sounds useful, the AI layer is the deciding factor.

Day-to-day, what does the difference feel like?

With a storage-only manager, your workflow is: copy, open history, find, paste. That's already a big improvement over the single-slot system clipboard, and Maccy nails it. But you still leave the app for anything beyond retrieval—open a separate tool to summarize a long quote, switch to a translator for a foreign-language reply, fix messy line breaks by hand after pasting from a PDF.

With ClipHistory, those steps collapse into the same popup. You copy a dense paragraph, run summarize, and paste the short version. You pull a saved template and run a quick rewrite for tone. You clean a messy paste in one action. The mechanical part of working with text happens where the text already lives. Whether that's worth it depends entirely on how much of your day is reshaping text versus just moving it.

Pricing model worth noting

One detail that's easy to overlook: ClipHistory is a one-time payment of $19.99 for a 12-month license, with no auto-renewal. You're not signing up for a recurring subscription, and you decide later whether to renew. For a tool you'll open dozens of times a day, knowing the cost up front is a small but real comfort.

If you want a clipboard manager that stores your clips and lets you summarize, rewrite, translate, and clean text right from the popup—all locally, with your own API key—get ClipHistory for macOS ($19.99) at https://cliphistory.com/download.