Why we built catu: one capture tool instead of six apps

Look at the right-hand end of your menu bar. If you take screenshots, record your screen, keep a clipboard history and dictate, there is a good chance four or five icons up there each belong to a different capture tool, each with its own account, its own update prompts and its own monthly fee. We counted ours one morning and decided to build one capture tool for the Mac instead.

The menu bar filled up one app at a time

None of it happened on purpose. A screenshot app arrived because the Mac's own one couldn't blur a password. A recorder arrived because a client wanted a video, not a paragraph. A clipboard manager arrived after losing a link for the third time in a week. A dictation app arrived when typing long replies got old. Each one was a good app. Together they were a crowd.

Every icon also meant a tab in System Settings for permissions, a separate login, a separate place where our files ended up, and a separate renewal date. Nothing talked to anything else. A recording lived in one cloud, a screenshot in another, and the text we copied out of a PDF lived nowhere at all.

What the subscriptions add up to

These are the list prices the companies publish today, 15 October 2026, for one person. They change, and most have a free tier that is enough for some people.

• Loom, screen recording with a share link: Business is $15 a person a month on an annual plan, $18 month to month.
• CleanShot X, screenshots and markup: $29 once for the app, plus Cloud Pro for sharing at $8 a month on an annual plan, $10 month to month.
• Wispr Flow, dictation: Pro is $12 a month on an annual plan, $15 month to month.
• Paste, clipboard history: $29.99 a year, about $2.50 a month.

At the annual rates that is roughly $37 a month, around $450 a year, for four jobs that all amount to the same thing: get something off the screen and in front of someone. None of these prices is outrageous on its own. The sum is what wears you down, and so is the feeling that every small tool now needs a subscription.

What each of them does that we don't

Being fair about this matters, because some people need exactly what these apps are built for.

Loom is built for teams. Unlimited recording length, workspaces, viewer analytics for a company, AI titles and summaries, and integrations with the tools large teams already pay for. If you record forty-minute walkthroughs for a hundred colleagues, Loom is the right tool, and catu is not: our recordings stop at ten minutes on purpose.

CleanShot X has had years to polish its editor and offers things like window captures with a wallpaper behind them. You can also buy the app once and never pay again, as long as you don't need its cloud.

Wispr Flow dictates on your phone as well as your Mac, and in more languages than Apple's on-device dictation covers today.

Paste keeps an unlimited history and syncs it to your iPhone and iPad.

What we do differently

One icon. Screenshots, markup, scrolling capture, text from the screen, screen recording with your camera and microphone, clipboard history and dictation, all behind the one catu mark in the menu bar. One set of permissions, one Settings window, one place to look.

The Mac side is free. Everything that runs on your Mac costs nothing and needs no account. We only charge for what costs us money to run: the cloud. Sharing a capture as a link, encrypted storage, your Library on the web and comments are catu Pro, at €4,99 a month or €49,90 a year, which works out at €4,16 a month. One subscription, not four.

Nothing leaves your Mac unless you share it. Clipboard history stays in memory, or encrypted on your disk if you choose to keep it. Dictation runs on the Mac itself, with Apple Intelligence tidying the text, and no audio is kept. When you do share, the file is encrypted on your Mac before it is uploaded.

People don't need an account to watch. A catu link opens in any browser. They can watch, read and comment under a name of their choosing. Only the person sharing pays.

Honest limits. Recordings stop at ten minutes. There are no team workspaces. It is Mac only, with an iPhone app planned for early 2027. If those are deal-breakers, one of the apps above will serve you better, and we would rather say so here than in a refund email.

The takeaway

Open System Settings › General › Login Items and count the capture tools that start with your Mac. Then open your card statement and add up what they cost a year. If the second number surprises you, that is the number we built catu to replace.

You can see everything catu does, and what is free and what is Pro, at catu.app.