Raycast

Raycast is a fast, keyboard-first productivity launcher that acts like a powerful, extensible shortcut to everything on your computer—originally built for macOS and now expanding to iOS and Windows—designed to centralize searches, commands, and workflows so you spend less time switching apps and more time getting work done. At its core it bundles practical tools such as clipboard history, snippets, quicklinks, a calculator, window-management utilities and a lightweight notes system, all reachable from a single command bar so common tasks feel instant and frictionless. What sets it apart is an ecosystem of extensions: a community-driven Store where you can install integrations for GitHub, Slack, Notion, Linear, music players and countless other services, and also build your own extensions using familiar web technologies (React, TypeScript, Node) and publish them to the Store. In recent years it has woven AI deeply into that experience — offering Quick AI for instant one-off answers, a persistent AI Chat window for in-context assistance, AI Commands for automating repetitive text tasks, and the ability to pick from multiple LLM providers and models inside the app — plus a browser extension that can summarize pages or analyze videos from the web.

Its business model keeps a generous free tier while offering a Pro plan that unlocks cloud sync, custom themes, unlimited notes and clipboard history and advanced AI access; team and enterprise tiers add admin controls and security features like SAML, SOC2 compliance, and organization-wide AI governance. The company has actively expanded to mobile with a fully featured iOS app that syncs essentials (AI chat, snippets, quicklinks and notes) and brings its speed to widgets, shortcuts and the lock screen, while a Windows beta and student discounts underline their push to reach more users. Overall, Raycast is aimed at people who prefer keyboard-driven, programmable workflows: it minimizes context-switching, surfaces the tools you use most, and gives developers and power users the hooks to customize and automate nearly anything from one lightweight command bar.