I Replaced CleanShot X With a Free Screenshot App I Built in One Session

I take screenshots all day. Client bugs, design notes, proof that a thing works. That meant CleanShot X, with Zight on the side. Both are good apps.

This week I replaced both with my own app. It's called FreeShot. It's free, it's open source under the MIT licence, and the code is on GitHub. I built it in one session with Claude Code.

The bit that matters if you run a business is that a paid tool you use every day is now a one-session job to replace.

What CleanShot X costs

From cleanshot.com/pricing on 2 Oct 2026: CleanShot Basic is $35 once for the Mac app with one year of updates. After that, updates are an optional $19 a year. CleanShot Pro is $10 per user per month, billed annually, and adds unlimited cloud storage and team features.

That's fair pricing for a polished app. But every small paid tool on your machine is a line on a card and a vendor you depend on. Most of the time that's the right call. I wanted to see what the other option looks like now.

What FreeShot does

FreeShot is a native macOS menubar app. It covers the parts of CleanShot X I use every day:

• ⌘⇧3 captures the full screen and ⌘⇧4 captures an area. ⌘⇧5 opens the All-in-One bar: Area, Window, Fullscreen, Previous Area, Self-Timer, Capture Text and Record Screen.
• Every capture saves a PNG to ~/screenshots, copies it to the clipboard and shows a small card at the bottom left. From the card you can copy, save, annotate, pin it to the screen or drag it out into another app.
• Area mode has a magnifier and shows the size as you drag. Press Space and it switches to window capture, with the window shadow.
• The annotate editor has arrows, lines, rectangles, ellipses, text, a highlighter, a pen, pixelate, blur, numbered steps, crop and undo.
• Capture Text reads the text out of an area with Apple's Vision framework. Record Screen saves an MP4.

The hotkeys were the thing I cared about most. On first launch, FreeShot reads them straight out of CleanShot's own settings file. My muscle memory didn't have to change at all.

How it got built

I split the work into four parts: capture, the card that shows after a capture, annotate, and the extras (pin, text capture, recording and settings). Parallel AI agents built the four parts at the same time.

Then a review pass went over the whole thing and found 9 defects. Two examples: two screenshots taken in the same second overwrote each other, and a Shift-drag collapsed to an empty capture. The same pass fixed all 9.

It's written in Swift on Apple's own frameworks (AppKit, ScreenCaptureKit and Vision), with no third-party dependencies. It has 134 automated tests.

What I've checked, and what I haven't yet

I tested the core on my own Mac. ⌘⇧3 gave a full-screen 3024×1964 Retina PNG. A 400×300 drag with ⌘⇧4 gave an 800×600 PNG, which is right for a Retina screen. ⌘⇧5 opened the bar, and Esc closed it.

Annotate, pin, text capture and recording are built and their logic has tests. I haven't used them day to day yet, so I won't tell you they're solid.

What I gave up

Building your own replacement isn't free in every sense. These are the trade-offs:

1. There's no vendor. Nobody ships me fixes when macOS changes. If an update breaks something, I fix it.
2. macOS asks for Screen Recording permission. If you build it without a signing identity, it asks again after every rebuild.
3. CleanShot X does things I didn't build, like its one-click cloud upload and share links.
4. The maintenance is mine now. It's one more thing I own.

For a screenshot tool on my own Mac, I'm happy with that trade. For a tool a whole team relies on, I'd think harder about who maintains it after the first week.

The second question

The old question was "is this tool worth the money?"

There's a second question now: "is it worth one session to build my own?"

For small, single-purpose tools on your own machine, the answer is more and more often yes.

The code is on GitHub at github.com/Danm72/freeshot. It's MIT licensed, so take it, change it and use it.