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Comment by gluteart | Hacker News Reader

I lived with Alfred for many-many years, but Raycast seems much better this days. Simpler yet richer and constantly developed, many plugins, it's simple to do your own and... it has window manager

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Is Raycast open source at all? With nearly $50M of funding (most recently $30M series B last fall) I have to wonder about the long term sustainability and whether I want to invest my time and workflows into the whims of a VC backed “free forever” plan.

Alfred has been around for ages and I’m reasonably confident the developers aren’t going to screw me.

This is a concern of mine as well. Alfred is also just so ridiculously lightweight and efficient compared to, well, everything these days. At 18MB on disk and sitting at 0% CPU and 42MB RAM on my machine right now with no spread of support processes, it feels almost like an endangered species Tiger-era Mac app that’s managed to survive to the current day.

I should upgrade mine. I was on Alfred 3 before using Raycast.

As much as I'd like to imagine investors are shoveling money into a pit because they want us to have nice software, the sheer amount of money feels like the only two options are (A) to reach profitability we're raising prices way up to juice the people who have become dependent on Raycast when it was affordable, or (B) blah blah incredible journey, our team is being acquihired for a sort of related project and Raycast will slowly wither and die as we realign priorities with the people who pay us.

I'm sure they'd like to squeeze Alfred and other competitors out of existence while they have the VC runway to underprice their software, but I'm not going to help them do that.

It’s positively comedic that Bluesky, an entire large social network has taken less funding ($36M according to [1]) compared to Raycast (… an application launcher).

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bluesky-514d#financi...

Development has been slow lately, but Quicksilver[0] is still around as a FOSS alternative. We have an upcoming release that should refresh things a bit for Seqouia.

[0]: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver

Launchbar[0] is also still around - not actively developed, but actively maintained. Happy user since 10 years already, even though I own a lifetime Alfred license.

[0]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

I went from Alfred to Raycast and then back again. They're both great, but I prefer Alfred. To each their own!

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