This Service Lets You Download and Use over 60 Mac Apps for $10 a Month

App subscription service Setapp has officially launched today, letting Mac owners download and use a variety of Mac applications for a fixed monthly fee.

The service, developed by developer MacPaw, aims to be an alternative to the Mac App Store, offering unlimited access to over 60 hand-picked and curated apps for $9.99 a month. The subscription price also includes app updates, major upgrades and all in-app purchases

To use Setapp, users just have to download and install the app. Once that happens, the app creates a folder in Finder, which includes a library of apps with thumbnails and descriptions. They don’t take up disk space until they are downloaded, but once they are, customers are free to use them as long as a subscription is active. Downloaded apps can be used in offline mode as well, and they’ll always be free of in-app ads, the developers promised.

One of the benefits of Setapp, according to its creators, is that the available apps are already hand-picked — negating the need to weed through pages of junk apps to find high-quality ones. At launch, Setapp will offer 61 apps, mostly focused on creative work and productivity, including Ulysses, RapidWeaver, iMazing, Gemini, CleanMyMac, Focused, and more. In the future, MacPaw said that it could offer subscribers up to 300 apps.

And it’s not just consumers that stand to benefit from a subscription model. For app developers, Setapp offers a steady stream of income. Around 70 percent of revenue will go to developers, as well as up to two-thirds of the remaining 30 percent as a “partner fee” based on the value of subscribers that developers bring to the service.