I have a potato laptop, running zen browser (already ram hungry) along with raycast AND wispr flow will melt my laptop. Ofcourse such an ask cannot be just dictated on one person's request. So i wish to have a petition maybe, so that the people at raycast can hear our broke requests and maybe consider having dictate in the free version.

And, maybe if raycast can have feature wise pricing, so like instead of me subscribing for the whole pro tier, if i can just pay for a considered fee for a singular feature (like dictate maybe), that'd be pretty rad too :P

Hey,

Thomas here, co-founder of Raycast. Thanks for raising concerns about some upcoming pricing changes with v2, particularly around Custom Providers and BYOK. To answer the main question directly: yes, under the new v2 plan, BYOK will require Raycast Pro.

I can see why “pay us so I can use my own key” feels strange. Dianne’s response accurately described the plan, but we shared that decision without explaining the broader pricing direction or the product changes behind it. We should have communicated this better. I want to provide a bit more context and be clear about what is decided today and where we’re heading.

Why We’re Changing Pricing

We launched Raycast Pro in May 2023 as a paid subscription. As part of it, you got Raycast AI, Cloud Sync, custom themes, and extended Clipboard History. A big part of the Pro plan was access to all LLMs.

Since then, the AI landscape has changed significantly. There are many more models, their costs vary considerably, and agentic loops have increased usage substantially. We tried bundling the Raycast product and all inference into one flat subscription, but with growing token usage, that no longer seems sustainable. So we took a step back and looked at the value Raycast itself provides.

Raycast as the Interface Layer

Raycast has always been about building a better interface on top of your existing tools. We think the clearest principle is that Raycast should be the interface layer, not the inference layer.

We spend our time making that interface as useful as possible, from the Launcher through Dictation and Notes to AI Chat. With v2, we’re rebuilding our AI system, adding memory, projects, automations, and more capable ways for AI to complete work for you.

With that in mind, we want to separate the value Raycast provides from the underlying inference costs. The Raycast subscription pays for the product around the model: the interface, context, integrations, tools, and execution layer. How the intelligence underneath it is supplied should become a separate and transparent choice. I feel this aligns our incentives much better because our business succeeds by making Raycast better, not by maximizing a margin on tokens.

I also understand that changing an existing feature is frustrating and potentially disruptive, especially for people who have already built their workflow around BYOK, Custom Providers, or local models.

What This Means in Practice

At the launch of v2, there will be two confirmed ways to use AI through Raycast Pro:

• Built-in models: We’ll continue providing access to LLMs through Raycast for convenience. We’re also exploring a more transparent usage-based model, but the details aren’t final yet. I’m curious to hear which approaches you’ve seen work well.
• BYOK: You can bring your own key for OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. We’ve seen many people use API keys provided by their employers.

Longer term, we want to offer more ways to supply the intelligence underneath Raycast:

• Existing subscriptions: Many people already pay for ChatGPT or Claude, and we don’t want to force them to purchase the same underlying AI capabilities again through Raycast. We’re working on ways to bring some of those existing subscriptions into Raycast.
• External and custom models: We’re working toward a way to connect more local and custom models. This is intended to become the path for Custom Providers in v2 and replace our existing Ollama and OpenRouter integrations. We currently see Custom Providers used mostly in enterprise environments, but I’d be interested to hear which other use cases matter to you.

All of these options use the same Raycast product around the model, which is why they will require a Pro subscription in v2. Your API key or existing subscription covers the LLM. Raycast Pro covers the interface, context, integrations, tools, and execution layer around it.

We offer a free 7-day Pro trial with no credit card required, so you can decide whether the product around the model is valuable to you. This is the current plan for v2, and we’ll publish the complete pricing before these changes roll out more broadly.

Going Forward

The industry is in a weird state. Many startups subsidize tokens to grow, but that isn’t the route we want to take. We see Raycast as a fundamental tool for many professionals and feel responsible for building a sustainable business that can control its own future and keep the product around for a long time.

For us, sustainability means charging for the value the product creates without betting on tokens becoming cheaper in the future. It also means being honest about the distinction between the model costs and the ongoing work required to build and maintain Raycast. This is why we chose a recurring subscription instead of a one-time payment. We ship updates every week and want the business model to align with that continued development.

This isn’t a plan to put all of Raycast behind a paywall. As before, the Launcher and the vast majority of the core Raycast experience will remain free.

Thanks again for holding us accountable. We should have explained the broader direction before communicating an isolated pricing decision. We haven’t figured out every detail yet, and I understand that this pricing model won’t work for everyone. But I hope the reasoning and where we’re heading are clearer now.

I’m here to listen and would love to hear your feedback, especially about how you use BYOK, Custom Providers, or local models today and what feels right to you.

I'm using Raycast since the first beta and was blown away by it's features and possibilities, also the vivid exchange in the futurebase forum.

Unfortunately I noticed some changes, now that the release is coming.

The futurebase forum is mostly closed down now. The only feedback you can share there, is for extensions.

There still is the app internal feedback, right but the transparency is gone, voting is gone, finding solutions with the community also gone.

Additionally to that, I rarely get any reaction from the feedback I filed. The reaction took weeks to get an answer for and the information of my feedback were hidden in the cut of in the subject line of the mail I got.

I answered anyway, yet no reply at all since weeks.

All in all, not very trustworthy from my point of view.

Second: I don't like the lack of option with pricing.

If you just want to use the local only tools, you still need to subscribe to it. No way to use something like optional updates for further versions or other models.
I don't use any of the AI features, so why should I pay reoccurring for a local only tool? The price is way too high to justify a purchase that will only give me a longer list of the history clipbord (that shouldn't be a pro feature in the first place as it is local only).

I don't mind paying for good software and its development but 10$ a month is just not worth it for the features I use or the ones that are hidden behind a paywall now.

Security is still something that they didn't fix when it comes to clipboard management.

Every clipboard manager that I know of has a way to turn off temporarily which makes sense for when you dealing with passwords or data like banking information. Raycast still didn't implement a simple command to turn off clipboard management. You only have the possibility to turn it off manually or delete the information after it was already saved... inconvenient an insecure from my perspective and something that needs to be fixed finally.

As far as I know, and have read, there is no way to configure Raycast to scroll through the Switch Windows extension in an old fashioned "Cmd-Tab-Tab-Tab" fashion, as it's impossible to set the hotkey to Cmd-Tab, and also have it cycle through the list with said hotkey. Has this by any chance changed in V2?
I'm finding less and less use cases for Raycast as a lot of what I want to do, simply isn't possible, and this is another case. It seems to me I really wouldn't need yet another app to pull this off, but I also can't within Raycast at the moment.

I'm one of the few people who come from windows' raycast and I'm unable to search for an app's shortcuts, like searching for incognito for chrome or new notes for the notes app.

On windows I didn't have to think about this at all but looking online it seems like I have to add a script for this which sounds insane for something as basic as this.

I'm pretty sure there must be a way by default and I'm just unable to find it

Hey everyone,
I’ve been using Raycast for about 3 to 4 years now, and watching the app evolve has been an incredible ride. I consider myself a pretty solid power user compared to the average setup. I have my free tier maxed out with an Hyperkey setup, dozens of custom quicklinks, and a stack of extensions I rely on every single day.

Despite how much I use it, I’ve never pulled the trigger on the Raycast Pro subscription ($8/mo) or the higher-tier plans. My current AI workflow lives mostly outside of Raycast :

Claude Desktop app (using Cowork).

Writing tools**:** A mix of Apple Intelligence and Claude.

Simple/Quick queries : Local Ollama models running in the background.

Personal API keys when needed.

This recently sparked a friendly debate with a buddy of mine. I get that Raycast Pro’s multi-model AI features are heavily aimed at developers, but is it actually worth it for a solid dev in 2026 ? Back in 2025, having unified AI model switching built right into your launcher was a massive selling point. But now, with native offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, Siri AI, and Gemini being so robust, paying a monthly subscription just for inline AI prompts feels a bit overkill when API keys or local models cover almost everything.

That said, Raycast isn't slowing down. The Raycast 2 beta introducing native Dictation is a huge win. Stacked up against dedicated tools like WhisperFlow, Raycast is turning into an ridiculously strong all-in-one package even for casual users.

I’d love to hear from the community :

1. If you pay for Raycast Pro (or the Advanced plan), what is the single feature or workflow that keeps you subscribed ? And what is your usage of AI with the pro plan, if you can give exemple it would be great !

2. Is the $8+/month cost justified by speed and context integration, or are you mostly paying for convenience over standalone apps/APIs ?

Curious to hear how you all integrate it into your daily stack ! Thanks y’all for your time, have a great day.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been noticing a pretty clear shift in sentiment within the Mac community lately regarding the direction Raycast is taking—especially with the announcement and rollout of Raycast v2.

While Raycast has been the darlings of the macOS productivity space for a while now, it feels like the community is becoming increasingly divided. From what I’ve gathered across forums and threads, the criticism mainly boils down to three big points:

1. Moving Away from "Mac Native" (Web Tech / React UI)

The biggest source of backlash seems to be the architectural shift.

• Raycast gained its loyal following by being a lightning-fast, purely native Swift app built specifically for macOS.
• With v2, they’ve transitioned to a hybrid stack incorporating web views/React to facilitate cross-platform development.
• Mac purists are concerned this will lead to a loss of that snappy "Apple-native" feel, potential rendering delays, UI inconsistencies, and the overall soul of a true Mac app.

2. Shift in Focus Toward Windows / Cross-Platform

There’s a growing feeling among Mac users that macOS is taking a backseat.

A massive amount of engineering resources has gone into porting Raycast to Windows.

Many feel that macOS innovation slowed down over the past year simply because the team was bogged down rewriting the core architecture just to accommodate other operating systems.

3. RAM Usage and Performance

Even though the Raycast team claims they haven't built a bloated Electron app (it's a custom optimized stack), they have acknowledged that v2 uses more RAM than v1. For an app meant to sit quietly in the background as a lightweight Spotlight replacement, any increase in resource usage is a hard pill to swallow for power users.

Despite that, I’ve seen a noticeable number of long-time users talking about jumping ship back to Alfred or even sticking to Spotlight.

What are your thoughts? Have you noticed a hit in performance or battery life with v2, or do you think the backlash is blown out of proportion? Are you sticking around, or looking at alternatives?

for some reason this brilliant app had gotten real slow for the past 2 months. its slightly embarrassing when i suddenly needed it right away especially when im working with other people...

whenever i call it out (i binded it to Ctrl + Q) theres a long delay before it pops out. and theres an even more longer delay whenever i type right away. and once im done typing theres also another delay. delay after delay after delay. whats going on? My Laptop is just new and is rocking a really powerful CPU (7 255HX) how come its starting to act up like this

is there maybe a fix? a workaround to make it like perform the original Raycast we know off? i already came from Flow Launcher tho its the same. i prefer the overall, but i prefer Raycast's extensions. Powertoys also sucks.

I work for a company with a few thousand employees, and they take IT/security pretty seriously. Surprisingly, Raycast is already on the list of approved apps for our managed work MacBooks, so I was able to install it without any issues.
The downside is that I obviously can’t install Raycast Beta, which means I can’t try any of the new AI features yet.

Getting a new application approved internally can take months, so I’m wondering if the team has shared how the beta rollout will work. Once the features are ready, will Raycast Beta simply become the stable version, or will all of the beta features be merged into the current production release of Raycast?

I made AgentWhisper because I wanted dictation to behave like a keyboard shortcut.

Hold a shortcut, speak, and your words appear at the cursor in the app you are already using—Mail, Notes, Slack, a browser, an editor, and more. Transcription runs locally on your Mac with Whisper, so your microphone audio does not go to a dictation service.

There is optional AI cleanup for turning a spoken draft into cleaner text. It uses your own API key and sends only the transcribed text to the provider you choose; you can also leave it off entirely.

It is a one-time lifetime license, not a subscription. The first 100 customers can buy for $19.99; it will be $79.99 after the launch offer ends. But for the Reddit fam ping me at altuzar at gmail and will send a coupon for free forever.

macOS 14.4+ required. Apple Silicon is fastest, and Intel is supported.

Demo / details: It is in my bio. :p

I built it and will answer questions here. What app would you use dictation in most?