Raycast’s AI Pricing Change: What It Means for Mac Users

If you use Raycast, you probably saw the email. On 10 September 2026 Raycast changed how its AI is priced. The headline sounded calm, "all subscription prices stay the same", and that part is true. What changed is what you get for the price.

Here is a plain explanation, as of late October 2026.

What changed

Before September, Raycast AI was rate-limited: you could make so many requests in a period, and better models sat behind an Advanced AI add-on.

Now it is usage-based. Each plan comes with a monthly allowance of AI credits. Every request spends some credits, and how many depends on two things: which model you pick and how much work the request does. A quick question to a small model costs little. A long document pushed through a frontier model costs a lot more.

The plans, from Raycast’s pricing page:

Team plans are $15, $25 and $65 per user per month for the same three tiers.

A few more details worth knowing:

• Credits expire 60 days after they are granted. So there is some carry-over from month to month, but you cannot bank them.
• You can top up when you run out, or move up a plan.
• Pro now includes models that used to need Advanced AI, according to the announcement. Frontier models sit on Plus and above.
• You can bring your own. Paid plans can connect a Claude or ChatGPT account, and Pro lets you use your own API key, a custom provider or a local model. You pay for that model separately.
• The announcement calls the renamed plan Pro+. The pricing page calls it Plus. Same plan.

Who this affects

If you do not use Raycast AI: nothing changed. The launcher, extensions, clipboard history, snippets and window management are all still on the free plan.

If you use AI a little: probably very little changed. Five hundred credits on Pro will cover a lot of quick questions on the cheaper models.

If you use AI a lot: this is the group the change is aimed at. Under rate limits, heavy use was capped but predictable. Now heavy use has a meter. If you push long documents through the best models every day, you may find yourself choosing between watching your credits, topping up, or moving to the $20 or $50 plan.

That is not unreasonable on Raycast’s part. Frontier models are expensive to run, and every company selling cloud AI has been moving the same way. But it does change the question from "is Raycast worth $10 a month?" to "how much AI do I actually use, and on which model?"

What to do about it

1. Check your usage first. Raycast shows it in the app. Do a normal week and see where you land before changing anything.

2. Pick cheaper models for small jobs. Credits go further on smaller models. Most rewording, summarising and quick questions do not need the best model available.

3. Consider bringing your own. If you already pay for Claude or ChatGPT, connecting that account may cost you less than a higher Raycast tier. If you would rather run a local model, Pro supports that too, though you set it up and run it yourself.

4. Split the jobs. A lot of "AI use" in a launcher is really a few different jobs: quick general questions, rewriting text, and asking things about your own files. They do not all need to go through the same meter.

The part about your own files

That last job is where we come in, so read this part knowing we make Dhito.

If a chunk of your Raycast AI use was "find the file where…" or "what does this contract say about…", that is a job a model running on your own Mac can do. It never needed a server. Dhito does it with:

• Search by meaning. Describe the file and it finds it, even if you have forgotten the name. That includes screenshots, found by what they show, and recordings, found by what was said.
• Chat with a file. Pick a document and ask it questions. The answer cites the passage it came from. The model runs on your Mac, so there are no credits, and the file never leaves the machine.
• Around 50 file tools. Compress, convert, merge, split, strip metadata, run from the same window.
• A flat price. $4.99 a month or $99 once, however much you use it.

What Dhito is not is a general AI assistant. It will not write your emails or answer questions about the world. It answers questions about your files. If you want general chat on a local model for free, Ollama and LM Studio are good options, and we wrote a guide to running local models on Apple Silicon.

And Dhito does not replace Raycast. Raycast is a much better launcher, and its window management, clipboard history, snippets and extensions are things Dhito does not do at all. The setup we suggest to most people is free Raycast plus Dhito: the launcher on one hotkey, file search and file chat on another. That costs $4.99 a month in total, which is half of Raycast Pro on its own. There is a longer side-by-side in Dhito vs Raycast.

The bigger picture

Raycast is not the only one doing this. Cloud AI costs real money per request, and flat-rate plans with generous limits were never going to last at every company. Expect more products to move to credits and tiers.

That makes it worth sorting your AI use into two piles: the jobs that really need a big cloud model, and the jobs a small model on your own machine can handle. The second pile is bigger than most people think, and it does not need a meter.