What apps from Setapp do you think are worth standalone purchase?

Cleanshot X Downie Soulver iStat Menus BetterTouchTool PopClip CodeRunner HazeOver Dropzone Swish Movist Pro HoudahSpot SuperCharge HandMirror Due Presentify Antinote I've bought standalone versions of most of Setapp apps and also subscribed to Setapp for a long time. The ones above are what I think are fairly priced and worth owning outright.

One more thing: (I had every Setapp app installed during my subscription, and outside that, I also bought DevUtils, TablePlus, Craft, Session, Gemini, BetterZip, Airbuddy, Proxyman, and a bunch more as standalone apps.) If you rely on many of the Setapp subscription apps, buying them individually usually isn't worth it. And some of the non-subscription apps I didn't mention either have better alternatives now or haven't been updated in a long time, so recommending them today feels risky. Pick what works for you. Also, worth watching apps.deals, BundleHunt, and the yearly Black Friday sales. Many of the good Setapp apps go on heavy discount there.

The correct answer is the apps you actually use and rely on.

CleanShot X Paste PopClip Yoink Dato Supercharge Sidenotes Compresto Permute Bartender Slidepad Appcleaner Honestly, these are the best of the best. They have very useful features, are unique, quite feature-packed, and can truly optimize your Mac and boost productivity, in my view. The reason I ranked Bartender very low compared to the others is that there are a lot of alternatives now. The latest edition is very buggy and glitchy, and quite memory-intensive. It's not a light app at all for what it's supposed to do... But without a doubt, I can't live without the top 5, and I'd cancel Setapp in a heartbeat if they didn't offer any of them. For instance, while there might be other good alternatives to CleanShot X as a screenshot and screen recording app, or to Setapp as a clipboard manager, these two offer so many features, and their UIs are pretty clean. They just have everything, to be honest. And Paste syncs with iCloud and has an iOS app that syncs, so I can see my Mac clipboard in my iPad and iPhone. As for PopClip and Yoink, they're very simple apps, but they boost my productivity and workflow so much. PopClip itself literally feels like a superpower with the right extensions. For instance, there's an extension for almost every note-taking app, chatbot, and simple functions like word count, character count, copy, paste, cut, notes, message, and email, and when you highlight the text, you can send it to those apps. The best extensions for poplicp by far are the search and open-link ones. Instead of copying and then pasting, you literally highlight with your cursor and press the search extension. It's simple stuff like this... And both PopClip and Yoink are super light apps, like I'm talking 20mg of memory each. I've been a Setapp subscriber for a year and a half now, and to be honest, it's pretty great. It gives you access to many great apps, but it's by no means essential. I think the best strategy is to get Setapp and try all these apps to see which one you actually use the most. If it is most beneficial to you, I would cancel Setapp and just get each one individually and buy them outright.

NotePlan. And for those suggesting Obsidian as a free alternative I would fully agree depending on your usage. For my part I heavily rely on meeting notes and the native integration of the calendar into NotePlan is something that, to my knowledge, no obsidian plugin has managed to offer.

Can’t believe no one mentioned Yoink

I have Yoink and must say it is my most used app ever. BUT… waiting for Alcove brings this functionality so let’s see how it will be working and then maybe drop it if it makes same service.

Sqlpro

Standalone apps only make sense for apps that you use daily. CleanShot X, Bartender and iStat Menus are the ones that justified the switch for me. Most of the catalogue ends up feeling like subscription filler once you drop Setapp.

rough rule for "worth standalone": you use it daily, it ships real updates, and the one-off is under 2 years of setapp ($240). by that bar: cleanshot x, bartender 4 (note: 5 is a new dev team), btt, popclip, soulver, hazeover. ~$30-45 each, all earn it. the trap is buying 12 of them. past 7 daily apps you're back at setapp's price without the discovery.

Which apps do you use the most if you have a subscription right now?

Depends heavily on your workflow, but the ones that justify standalone purchase for most people: CleanShot X : best screenshot tool on Mac, one-time purchase available directly from their site. Use it daily. Bartender : menu bar management, one-time purchase. The kind of utility you forget you're using until it's gone. Mosaic / Mango : window management, cheaper than Moom standalone but solid. The ones I'd skip buying standalone: anything you use occasionally but not daily. Setapp's value is the long tail of apps you'd never buy outright but use once a month. What's your main use case? That changes the answer significantly.

Alternatives: CleanShot X: -> Shottr is way cheaper and has most of the same features. Bartender -> Thaw is open source and therefore free. Covers the same basic functionality and is very stable. Actually worked better than Bartender for me personally.

No screen recording kills Shottr for me. Otherwise it’s a great app.

People always mention Shottr as a Cleanshot X replacement, and it just isn’t. Yeah it has many of the same features, but not all of them and it’s not nearly as user friendly in its workflow.

To be honest, none. Setapp has gone downhill for the past years. It's either abandonware in their catalog, or some weird low-quality apps. Absolutely not worth it.

I was planning to get setApp. What’s your experience?

I’ve had it for about a year. I like being able to add and remove apps without worrying about the pricing. I wish more new and trending apps were in the marketplace.

I started with SetApp in the very beginning. Even have one of their early supporter mini puzzles. (Cool little wood block Tetris like puzzle pieces you put together to make a specific shape) I paid for it for years. It was great… until it wasn’t. The apps are slow to get updates (because of the SetApp ark they have to include it means a separate build of each app) Many of the apps just sit like abandonware. Some do have limitations even though they aren’t supposed to, and they fishing around a new model that sounds great in theory (à la carte) but the pricing goes up doing it. I also some developers who used to be on SA but left because they were not making enough to offset the extra effort and maintenance costs. I have also found through the years that the devs respond to direct customer concerns and support much more quickly than their SetApp customers. YMMV

Cleanshot X, Text Sniper, Paste (I have a role where I often have repetitive communications with end users so I use a combo of these most frequently.

Why do you use Text Sniper when Cleanshot X already has language-aware OCR built in

Paste is great. It's just freaking expensive

BetterTouchTool is the one I always come back to. the amount of customization you get for a one-time price is absurd. I've been using it for 4 years and still discover new things it can do. CleanShot X is a close second, especially if you do any kind of screen recording or annotation regularly.

If you handle sensitive documents, Elephas deserves a place. CleanShot X is the one I use everyday.

Many others listed here. I use whispertranscribe exhaustively in my editing workflows. And chronosync as part of my backup automations.