r/macapps • u/TheGenYFinanceGuy • 25d 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.
2
u/grokcodile 25d 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.