TextExpander adds a free plan for Mac, iPhone and iPad, with five active snippets and one swap a fortnightTextExpander adds a free plan for Mac, iPhone and iPad, with five active snippets and one swap a fortnight

TextExpander, the text expansion app for Mac, iPhone and iPad, now has a free plan that does not expire.

The company told 9to5Mac on 8 October that the Free plan gives five active snippets, unlimited library storage, unlimited expansions and up to five team members. A snippet is TextExpander's word for a short abbreviation that expands into longer, pre-written text as you type. The plan works on Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows and Chrome, and one library syncs across all of them. TextExpander's own plan page also lists Android.

What the free plan includes

TextExpander's plan page and FAQ set out the limits. You can save as many snippets as you like, but only five expand at any one time. Changing which five are active is rationed to one swap every two weeks. Autocorrect snippets, which fix typos, do not count towards the five.

• Five active snippets, with unlimited saved snippets and snippet groups
• One swap every two weeks between a saved and an active snippet
• Basic fill-in fields, and simple date and time insertion
• Up to five team members across up to three teams, each with their own five active snippets
• A 30-day preview of paid features on sign-up

The free plan leaves out what long-time users tend to rely on: scripting in JavaScript, AppleScript and shell, date and time arithmetic, nested snippets, conditional fill-ins and sharing outside a team. Those stay in the paid plans.

How much do the paid TextExpander plans cost?

Prices are in US dollars, from TextExpander's pricing page on 8 October 2026. When a trial ends without a paid plan, the account drops to Free and every snippet stays in the library, according to the FAQ, though only five keep expanding.

Our take

Five snippets and a swap every fortnight is a sample, not a plan you can live in. The rationed swap is the telling detail. Without it, you could keep a large library and rotate whatever you need that day, so it exists to stop the free plan replacing the paid one. That is fair enough, but it means the free tier is mostly there to keep lapsed trial users in the app.

The competitor here is not another app but Apple's own text replacement, which is free, has no limit and syncs over iCloud. On a Mac it lives under System Settings, Keyboard, Text Replacements, according to Apple's support guide. What it cannot do is TextExpander's paid list: fill-in fields, dates, nested snippets, scripts. So the sensible split, which 9to5Mac also suggests, is to leave short, fixed phrases in Apple's replacements and spend the five free slots on longer ones with fill-in fields, which macOS cannot do at all.

A free tier with a firm limit is a familiar move for subscription apps that need new users, and it runs against Apple putting premium features in Pages, Keynote and Numbers behind Creator Studio. APPDOOK's view is that TextExpander's limit is set in about the right place for a company that wants trials to convert: enough to show what a fill-in snippet can do, and not enough to make the paid plan pointless. Nothing on the pricing page suggests current subscribers lose anything, and anyone who left over the subscription now has a way to keep their library without paying.