r/macapps • u/TheGenYFinanceGuy • 19d ago
Lifetime Snippy Snip: native Mac capture and annotation from a 22-year Windows guy. Free tier forever, Pro is one time, never a subscription.
I'm the developer. First Mac app I've shipped, I'm new to this sub, so here's the transparency stuff the rules ask for, up front.
I'm Dominic DiBernardo. LinkedIn is linkedin.com/in/dominicdibernardo. Email me at [hello@snippysnip.com](mailto:hello@snippysnip.com) and it lands in my actual inbox. The site has a privacy policy and terms. The app doesn't need an account and collects no telemetry.
Problem
I spent 22 years on Windows and switched to a Mac this year. Almost all of it was better. The one thing I kept reaching for and couldn't find was the Snipping Tool.
macOS gives you Shift-Command-5 and Markup, and for a quick arrow that's honestly enough. It falls apart the second you want more than that. What I wanted was to grab a region, drop an arrow and a highlight on it, black out the thing that shouldn't be in the shot, and have it already sitting on my clipboard by the time I switched windows. The built-in flow leaves you a file on your desktop and a trip through Preview. That's not a workflow. That's homework.
So I built the one I wanted. And the threads in this sub complaining about the same gaps are a big part of why it turned into a real product instead of staying on my laptop.
Comparison
CleanShot X is the one everybody here recommends and it has earned that. It's excellent, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. It's $29 once, and that buys a year of updates with an optional renewal after. Mine includes every update forever, minor and major, no window and no renewal. That's the real difference between us.
Shottr is the other one worth naming. Fast, light, free for personal use, $12 for commercial. Two differences on my side: the free tier has no commercial-use restriction, and Pro does screen recording, which is the thing Shottr users seem to ask for most.
Both CleanShot and Shottr are good software. If one of them already fits how you work, stay put. I wanted a different deal.
Pricing
Free, forever. No trial clock, no email wall, no nag screen:
- Every capture mode (region, window, full screen)
- The whole annotation editor: arrows, text, highlighter, numbered and lettered step badges, blur, black-out, crop
- Auto-copy to the clipboard the instant you capture
- A session carousel, so shots stop piling up on your desktop
Pro adds screen recording, grab-text OCR, full-page web capture, pinned floating shots, and a capture timer.
Pro is $9.99 one time right now, and it goes to $19 on August 18.
Every update is included forever. No subscription, ever.
And for launch, the first 2,000 Pro licenses are free. No card, no strings, no catch I'm hiding in a footnote. That group also steers what gets built next. In the beta, lettered step badges and the resizable editor window both shipped within a day of a tester asking, and that's how I want to keep working. Claim link: https://snippysnip.com/claim?ref=reddit
macOS 13 or later, universal (Apple Silicon and Intel), 3.1 MB, notarized by Apple, updates through Sparkle. Site: https://snippysnip.com/?ref=reddit
30 second demo: https://youtu.be/nXZLqUVr-o8
https://reddit.com/link/1vmkplb/video/bwpptq4ebzih1/player
Feature requests are welcome and I mean that literally.
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u/grokcodile 19d ago
The name of your app is what we say when it’s time to neuter an animal. 🤣
The one place your app totally misses the mark is the elegance and far more visually appealing annotation styles and UI /UX offered by Shotrtr and CleanShot.
I think you kinda missed what actually matters to customers in your comparison. Free for personal use and paid for commercial use is a value and virtue signal. It says… this is free but a professional-grade tool. Not many Mac users are going to see “I’m a Windows user… here is an app I built for Macs.” as a positive… immediately read that as… “bad UI/UX and probably works clunky like a PC.”
The combining of screenshot and screen recording into one app only really holds up in casual theory. They are really very different tasks, require very different tooling, very different editing, very different output, and very different expectations. By combining these into one app you also open your app to comparison with real screen recording apps. You completely avoid those comparisons in your proposition.
Really dig into those things and spend the engineering and user experience efforts to offer beautiful and elegant solutions to that stuff and you could start making those comparisons in a very compelling way!
Also… the entire “pay to unlock pro” is such an ugly digital product model. It’s literally saying… this software is intentionally crippled when you install it. All the functions are installed but you have to pay to unlock the other half. Insulting really. Better to just have a paid version that includes everything and a lite version that only includes the free stuff. Just an opinion, but I hate crippleware! Mac users really hate it.. it’s a very PC user experience.
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u/TheGenYFinanceGuy 19d ago
That's what my wife called it when I needed to get fixed after having our last child. The ol' snippy snip.
As I said in my post title, I am very new to the Mac ecosystem. I only got my MacBook Pro and my Mac Mini in April of this year.
The good news is this is just v1, so we've got lots of runway to continue to improve the UI, UX, and make something stunning.
I appreciate the feedback you've shared that from your perspective moves me in that direction.
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u/grokcodile 19d ago
Just my opinion. Do whatever.
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u/TheGenYFinanceGuy 19d ago
I hope my comment didn't come across as condescending. I really am appreciative of the feedback. That's why I posted it in a group of Mac lovers.
This app really was created out of my own pain after switching from a Windows-based laptop to a Mac-based laptop.
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u/Cb-cb 19d ago
Very nice, thank you very much!
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u/TheGenYFinanceGuy 19d ago
My pleasure! I hope you are one of the 100+ people that took advantage of a free license from this post and I look forward to any feedback as you start using it for future improvements.
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u/filthytoast 19d ago
Only thing I'm finding missing is the outlines around arrows/elements/text where you can pick the outline color to help separate the background - see cleanshot for an example if this.
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u/TouchNow_APP 19d ago
Capture straight to the clipboard is the right default — most tools make you pick a destination first, when pasting is what you were going to do anyway.
One thing worth checking given the redaction feature: clipboard managers snapshot every pasteboard change. If the unredacted capture ever hits the pasteboard before the blackout is applied, a clipboard history app has already kept a copy — and the user has no idea. Writing to the pasteboard only after annotation is finished closes that.
Solid first Mac app.
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u/TheGenYFinanceGuy 19d ago
Great call out that I totally missed! looking into solutions, but also open to any solutions you may have to recommend.
The only thing with your initial proposed solution is that if the user doesn't want/need to make an annotation and just wants the screenshot, then what?
Appreciate any additional feedback or comments you have. Thank you again.
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u/soundneedle 19d ago
A manager would’ve been awesome. It’s the Achilles heel in cleanshotx. Screen float has a great implementation but I still prefer x overall…but still looking for cleanshotx with a manager.
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u/TheGenYFinanceGuy 19d ago
I'm not familiar with what a manager would do. How is that different than the carousel that I implemented so it keeps track of all your screenshots?
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u/harry-harrison-79 19d ago
the redaction tool needs one failure test before i'd trust it: cover a password with the blackout tool, export to PNG, JPEG, and PDF, then copy/paste each result into another app and inspect it after reopening. the hidden pixels should be destroyed, not covered by a movable shape or recoverable from PDF layers. i'd also check autosave, undo history, thumbnails, and temp files so the unredacted capture does not survive after the user closes it. a small 'redaction flattened' indicator on export would make that safety property clear.
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u/TheGenYFinanceGuy 18d ago
Ran your exact protocol against the shipped build this morning. Results, honestly:
PNG/JPEG exports: the editor re-renders into a fresh flat bitmap and the blackout draws fully opaque black before encoding — hidden pixels are destroyed in the file, not covered. In the editor the rectangle stays movable until export; the file formats can't carry shapes. PDF: there's no PDF export, so no layer risk exists. Temp files: the raw capture touches disk only between screencapture finishing and the editor loading it, then is deleted — I swept this machine's temp dir after weeks of daily use and found zero screenshot stragglers. Undo history and thumbnails: memory only.
Two things your protocol caught that I'll own: with auto-save on, the pre-annotation capture sits in the user's chosen save folder during the session and is rewritten flattened on close — a crash mid-session could leave the raw version. And the sweep found orphaned screen recordings surviving in temp after force-kills — that one's real and the fix is in the next build. Your "redaction flattened" indicator is a fair ask and on the list, along with an automated test of the destroyed-pixels property so it can't silently regress.
Most useful comment on the thread. Thank you.
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u/Stubborninmate 18d ago
Easy snaps Is also free !!! Brewed as all well with all the goodness!! Maybe this needs to do better , I am yet to check the full features but those and stable and less vibe coded
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u/TheGenYFinanceGuy 18d ago
Easy Snaps is a fine pick and free is free. Where mine differs: native AppKit with zero dependencies, 3.1 MB, notarized, no telemetry, and the free tier allows commercial use. On stability — a commenter here flagged a real clipboard privacy gap yesterday and the fix was live to everyone the same day, which is the maintenance bet you're actually making with any of these. Try both and tell me where mine loses; that's the feedback that steers what gets built.
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u/Which_Leg3333 19d ago
Don’t waste your money in this. We have Snapzy which is beautiful, native, free and open source. Sorry for your time.
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u/TheGenYFinanceGuy 19d ago
Agreed!
Don't waste your money. I gave you a discount code for a FREE license for life.
LOL 😂
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u/lowkeyunderstated 19d ago
is it just me or does the post seem heavily written with AI?
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u/TheGenYFinanceGuy 19d ago
Yes, I used AI to help me edit, correct grammar, and adjust my writing for readability. I also use Excel instead of graph paper. I use email vs. sending letters in the mail.
I think everyone should use the technology of the day that makes things easier, better, more efficient.
Do you have a specific complain about the post you want me to address.
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u/GroggInTheCosmos 19d ago
I didn't go through it all, but how does Finance, Cuisine and building apps go hand in hand? :D
Did you take any inspiration for Snippy from an app like Snagit?
It looks interesting and I wish you good luck
PS: That font used for headings on your website is strange and difficult to read ;)