Compiled by Amit KumarWhat is Raycast?
Raycast is a launcher: one keyboard shortcut opens a command bar, and from there you open apps, search files, manage windows, paste from clipboard history, expand snippets, take notes and run extensions.
It replaces a handful of small utilities with one surface, and on paid plans it adds an AI layer you can call from the same bar.
Raycast launched on Product Hunt in 2020 and has the strongest community signal in this batch: 36K followers and a 4.9 rating from 160 reviews. It won the 2023 Golden Kitty Awards, and Raycast Notes took the Personal Productivity Golden Kitty for 2024. Raycast 2.0 landed at #4 of the day on 11 September 2026. The company is Y Combinator-backed.
Prices come from raycast.com/pricing and the credit mechanics from Raycast's manual, both read on 24 September 2026.
Is Raycast free?
The launcher is free and genuinely complete. AI is not included at any level of the free plan.
This is a cleaner split than most freemium products manage, and it is worth understanding before you compare Raycast to an AI tool, because on the free tier it is not one.
- Free includes: the core launcher, thousands of extensions, the ability to write your own, developer tooling, and clipboard history limited to 3 months.
- Free excludes: Raycast AI entirely, cloud sync between machines, dictation, custom themes, the translator, and unlimited notes.
- Teams Free: $0 a user, with up to 30 shared snippets and quicklinks and up to 5 shared commands, plus a private extension store.
Plenty of people use Raycast for years without paying. If what you want is a faster way to drive your machine, the free tier is the product. If you want AI in the command bar, that is the whole of what the subscription buys.
How much does Raycast cost?
Individual plans: Pro $10 a month ($96 a year), Plus $20 a month, Max $50 a month. Team plans run $15, $25 and $65 a user a month for the same three tiers.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | AI credits a month | Credits per dollar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | None | — |
| Pro | $10 | $96 | 500 | 50 |
| Plus | $20 | Not published | 3,000 | 150 |
| Max | $50 | Not published | 7,500 | 150 |
| Teams Pro | $15/user | $144/user | 500 | 33 |
| Teams Plus | $25/user | $240/user | 3,000 | 120 |
| Teams Max | $65/user | $624/user | 7,500 | 115 |
Enterprise is quoted by sales and adds an AI control centre, organisation admin controls and SAML/SCIM.
Pro is the worst value per credit, by a factor of three
Pro buys 50 credits per dollar. Plus and Max both buy 150. Doubling your spend from $10 to $20 triples your AI allowance rather than doubling it.
That is our arithmetic from the published credit counts: 500 ÷ $10, 3,000 ÷ $20, 7,500 ÷ $50. Plus and Max land on exactly the same rate, so above $20 you are buying volume at a flat price, not a better one.
The practical reading: if 500 credits is comfortably enough, Pro at $10 is the cheapest way into Raycast AI. The moment you run out, go to Plus rather than topping up Pro — you are paying three times the rate at the bottom of the range.
What is an AI credit?
Not a message. Raycast's manual is explicit: "Credits measure AI usage, not a fixed number of messages. How many you use depends on the model and how much text it reads and writes."
It goes further: "Input and output are priced differently, so the same prompt can cost different amounts on different models." Long conversations, attachments, tool calls and edited messages all add to the total.
So Raycast will not tell you how many questions $10 buys, and by its own explanation it cannot. The number depends on which model you pick and how much context you hand it.
This is honest, and it is also a planning problem. The only way to size your plan is to run on Pro for a month and watch the meter. Budget on the assumption that heavy use of top-tier models burns credits far faster than light use of fast ones, because that is exactly what the manual describes.
A naming inconsistency to know about
The pricing page calls the $20 tier Plus. The manual calls the same 3,000-credit tier Pro+. Same price, same allowance, two names across Raycast's own documentation — worth knowing when you are searching support articles for the plan you are on.
Is Raycast Mac-only?
No longer. Raycast for Windows launched on Product Hunt on 21 November 2025 and finished #1 of the day.
For most of its life Raycast was a macOS product, and a great deal of writing about it still says so. That is out of date.
One caveat on sourcing: the Windows release is documented on Raycast's Product Hunt listing, while raycast.com/pricing still frames availability around macOS and does not enumerate platforms. If you are buying seats for a mixed fleet, confirm the current Windows feature parity with Raycast directly rather than assuming the two builds are identical.
Who Raycast suits, and who it does not
It suits people who work from the keyboard and resent reaching for the mouse — developers most obviously, but anyone who lives in a lot of applications at once. The extension library is the real moat: thousands of them, plus the ability to write your own, which turns the launcher into a front end for whatever internal tooling you have.
The team tiers suit a shared-knowledge problem more than an AI one. Shared snippets, quicklinks and commands, and a private store for internal extensions, mean a team can standardise the small automations that otherwise live on one person's machine.
It does not suit anyone shopping specifically for an AI assistant, because per credit Raycast is a launcher that sells AI as an add-on rather than an AI product with a launcher attached. And it does not suit anyone who needs to forecast AI spend precisely — Raycast has told you, in the manual, that the unit is not predictable.
What to use instead of Raycast, and for which job
Stay on Raycast Free if you want a launcher. It is complete: thousands of extensions, custom extensions and developer tooling, with no time limit. AI is the only thing the subscription adds.
Go straight to Plus, not Pro, if 500 credits will not cover you. Plus gives three times the credits for twice the money, and Max offers no further improvement in rate — only more volume.
A dedicated assistant, if AI is the point. Per credit, Raycast sells AI as an add-on to a launcher. If you want an AI product rather than a faster keyboard, buy one directly and keep Raycast free.
Teams Free before Teams Pro. Shared snippets, quicklinks and commands cost nothing at $0 a user, which is enough to standardise a team before anyone approves a budget.
Sources
Every figure on this page was read from the pages below on 24 September 2026.
- Raycast pricing — individual and team plan prices, annual rates, AI credit allowances and what the free tier includes
- Raycast manual: AI usage limits — the statement that credits are not messages, that input and output price differently, and the Pro / Pro+ / Max allowances
- Raycast on Product Hunt — the 2023 Golden Kitty, the 2024 Personal Productivity award, the Windows launch at #1 of the day, follower and review counts
