“It is a subjective opinion definitely, and I am referring to the pivot meaning Raycast trying to become something else (more like an AI harness tool), and the decline meaning the quality/usefulness of the tool (rather than company profitability) - again based on my subjective opinion”
“You keep increasing pricing, but the quality of the tool became very poor, and the number of bugs is increasing (I even stopped to report all of them, updates became a painful experience).”
“I'm not a Raycast user (tried it a while back and went back to Alfred) and just wandered in here from another sub and was totally confused by the hubub. I thought "Surely, I must be misunderstanding what they're charging for here.”
“The evolution of the product is to bloat the experience of the user advertising AI capabilities EVERYWHERE. The experience is so bad that after trying to disable what I did not want, I realized that the pattern is to present a functionality and add an AI-boosted option for EACH functionality, whatever it makes sense or not.”
“So I’m done with Raycast. I’m leaving over one feature. That’s the weakness. I find another app that may be subpar to yours in almost every way, but at least it provides that single feature at no monthly cost.”
“It's pretty arrogant of any of us to imply we're a representative voice for the entire Raycast subscriber base. That isn't to say the complaints here aren't warranted.”
“Nobody told them not to monetize, everything was fine for a long time and they remained in good standing while profiting, but they had to get greedy.”
“The ability to run existing Raycast extensions and import an existing setup is probably the biggest selling point for me, since switching launchers usually means rebuilding a bunch of workflows from scratch.”
“I tried using Raycast a year ago based on MKBHD's recommendation. But I found it kind of bloated and annoying in some ways, when Apple updated Spotlight recently, I found it to be a nice upgrade, but I still turn off a lot of it's search results, like safari etc...”
“Started using Tinycast and most of the extensions I was using with Raycast are working fine, and it has a much smaller memory footprint compared to Raycast, so I absolutely love it.”
“I love using Raycast, advocate for it all the time, and have even been asked by friends to get on a soapbox about it (I didnt!), and I want them to do well.”
“I suppose unashamedly ripping off another app (Raycast) makes it possible to release an alternative for free. This is almost pixel for pixel a clone.”
“For example, I love Raycast, but I use at most 5% of its functionality; when that 5% costs as much as an OpenAI subscription, I am more likely to say no.”
“Being able to import a Raycast setup should make switching much less painful. How well do extensions behave in practice—are there any categories that still need work, like auth-heavy ones?”
“You mention Raycast moving in a direction you're not crazy about, and I'm curious what that is for you. I only use pretty basic features, so apart from resource usage I don't really have complaints about it, which probably means I'm just not hitting whatever everyone else is hitting.”
“His new v2 is happily still touting Raycast extension compatibility and I have no idea how much of my contributions made it into that paid software (which legally is fine, MIT license is what it is) but that put a hugely bad taste in my mouth and made me not ever want to trust anything by him ever again.”
“The decision from Raycast to put BYOK behind a paywall makes me considering alternatives. Currently Supercmd 2 is great, have some features that Raycast doesn't have..”
“I've been looking for a Raycast alternative since it appears to be moving in a direction that I'm not particularly crazy about. So I came across Tinycast, a free and open-source macOS launcher, btw I'm not associated with the developer and I have just started using the app in the last few days.”
“If anything, it means that they have value? If their value was only in the model, then people that bring their own model won’t make this post 3x a day, and people would altogether stop paying.”
“I’ve been a long time paying Raycast user but ultimately over the past year I’ve not used it for anything more than a couple of quick keys to launch apps and just launching apps in general. All of which I was able to replicate in the new Apple Spotlight with a few shortcut actions.”
“@Holanda73 @peduarte @raycast Right, but I don't want to use Raycast as my harness. I want to use Claude Code as my harness. Raycast is my enablement engine.”
“For me, Raycast has been crazy accurate, even when using technical names, odd farscape character names, anything I can throw at it. There’s not many options to configure, but it does just work”