Sixteen years of using one percent of an app
I've had Alfred on every Mac I've owned since 2010. In that time I have used it, almost exclusively, for two things: launching applications, and doing sums.
That's it. That's the whole relationship.
The confession
Alfred can do a great deal more than that. It has workflows. It can set timers, control Spotify, file things into OmniFocus, run scripts, chain actions together, manage your clipboard history, search inside files. There's a whole community building elaborate things with it.
I've tried. Repeatedly, over the better part of sixteen years. I've installed workflows other people made and admired them. I've set up the Spotify controls. I've wired it to my task manager. And every single time, it stayed in novelty territory — a thing I'd demonstrated to myself once and then quietly stopped using.
I've never built a workflow of my own. Not one.
Why I don't think that's a failure
For a long time I read that as a personal shortcoming — that I was underusing a powerful tool, and if I just sat down properly I'd unlock the rest of it.
I've stopped believing that. What I actually need, dozens of times a day, is to summon an app without touching the trackpad, and to work out what 19% of 4,850 is without breaking stride. Alfred does both instantly, has done for sixteen years, and has never once made me think about it.
A tool that does the two things you need, perfectly, forever, has not failed because you declined the other forty.
And this is exactly why I'm not switching
Every so often someone asks whether I've tried the newer launchers. Raycast, mostly. They look genuinely good, they're free to start, and they're moving fast.
They also promise everything Alfred's workflows promise, plus an extension store, plus their own AI services, plus a subscription to hold it all together.
Given that I've spent sixteen years demonstrably not wanting the extra forty things Alfred already offered me for free — why would I move to something whose pitch is more of them? I'm not the customer for that. I don't need more.
This isn't a criticism of Raycast, which by all accounts is excellent at what it does. It's an observation about me, and possibly about you. Before switching to the tool that does more, it's worth checking whether you ever used the extra capacity of the one you've got.
What to actually buy
Alfred itself is free, and the free version covers launching and the calculator — which, by my own account above, is everything I genuinely use.
The Powerpack is £34 once, or £59 with lifetime upgrades, and it's what unlocks workflows, clipboard history, file actions and the rest. I own it. Sixteen years of use and a project this small makes it comfortable money either way, and paying for software you rely on daily is a reasonable habit even when you're using a fraction of it.
But I'd be lying if I told you that you need it. Install the free one. If you find yourself reaching for something it won't do, the Powerpack is right there. If you don't — and you may well not — you've lost nothing, and you're in good company.
The verdict
The software I touch most on this machine, and it shows up in my own usage data as twenty-two launches, because I start it once at login and then it simply exists. If I set up a new Mac tomorrow, Alfred goes on before almost anything else — and then I'll use one percent of it for another sixteen years, quite happily.
Part of the Mac software I actually use — nineteen tools, one write-up a week. Put together with AI, based entirely on my own use and opinions.
