Paste costs 29.99 € a year.
Here's the five-year math.

Paste is the best-known clipboard manager on the Mac, and it deserves the reputation. It's also a subscription. If you're weighing it up — or wondering why your card gets charged every year — here's what it actually costs, with no spin.

Paste's pricing, as of August 2026

Straight from Paste's own pricing page: the Personal plan is 29.99 € billed annually (they show it as 2.49 €/month), every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, and there's a one-time lifetime option alongside the subscription. Team and Family plans exist too. Paste is also bundled in Setapp if you subscribe there.

The five-year math

A clipboard manager isn't a tool you use for six months. It's infrastructure — you'll still be using it in 2031. So the honest comparison isn't the sticker price, it's the running total.

Paste is cheaper for the first eighteen months. After that the lines cross and never cross back. By year five you've paid roughly three times more — and the meter is still running.

That's not an argument that subscriptions are evil. Recurring revenue is what lets a team keep shipping. It's an argument that you should know which model you're signing up for, because for a utility you'll use daily for a decade, the difference is real money.

No, Paste wasn't acquired by WeTransfer

This one comes up constantly, and we'll be blunt: an earlier version of this article got it wrong, and we've rewritten it. Here's the actual situation.

There are two unrelated products named Paste. The one people mix up is Paste by FiftyThree, a collaborative presentation tool. WeTransfer acquired FiftyThree in 2018, so WeTransfer does own something called "Paste." And in July 2024, the Italian company Bending Spoons acquired WeTransfer — which is where the rest of the confusion comes from.

None of that touches Paste the clipboard manager at pasteapp.io. It was built by Dmitry Obukhov, it remains independent, and it's actively developed. If you're a Paste user, nobody sold your clipboard manager to a holding company.

Sources: TechCrunch — Bending Spoons acquires WeTransfer · FiftyThree (Wikipedia) · Paste pricing

Is Paste still good?

Yes. It's polished, it syncs across Mac, iPhone and iPad, and the design is genuinely excellent. If you're a happy subscriber, there is no reason to switch on our account. We'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

The question worth asking is narrower: do you want to rent your clipboard? For a lot of people the answer is yes, and Paste is the right call. For the rest, there are one-time options.

The one-time-purchase alternatives

We cover the full landscape in our Best Paste alternatives for Mac in 2026 guide. The short version:

MacPaste — pay once (yes, we're biased)

Unlimited local history, 7 color tags, hover preview and pinned boards, free forever. Pro is 49 € once, no subscription, 5.9 MB, everything stays on your Mac by default. Fair warning so you buy with your eyes open: iCloud sync and the iPhone app are still in development, and Pro includes them when they ship. MacPaste vs Paste.

Maccy — free and open source

If you only copy text and want something minimal, Maccy is excellent. MIT-licensed, actively maintained, genuinely free. No images, no sync, no labels. MacPaste vs Maccy.

Pastebot — the established premium pick

Tapbots' one-time purchase, with powerful filters and regex transformations. No iCloud sync and no iPhone app, but rock solid for power users. MacPaste vs Pastebot.

Raycast — if you want the launcher too

Raycast Pro includes a capable clipboard history. Worth it mainly if you already live in Raycast as your launcher — otherwise it's another subscription. MacPaste vs Raycast.

Why we publish this

We compete with Paste, so treat our recommendation with the scepticism it deserves. What we can commit to is the part we control: the numbers on this page come from public sources, they're linked above, and when we get something wrong we correct it in public rather than quietly deleting the page.

Your clipboard is one of the most-used surfaces of your workflow. Whichever tool you land on, pick it on the facts.