Raycast is a keyboard-first productivity launcher that replaces Spotlight with a richer command palette for opening apps, searching files, managing clipboard history, expanding text snippets, running window-management actions, and querying AI models. Everything happens inside one floating window driven entirely by the keyboard, which is the whole point of the product — the team's pitch from day one has been that mousing around a Dock or Stage Manager is a tax most power users no longer want to pay.

The company was started in 2020 in London by Thomas Paul Mann and Petr Nikolaev, two ex-Facebook engineers who got tired of how clunky their own internal tooling felt and decided to rebuild the Mac launcher from scratch. The macOS app shipped first, the Extensions API and Store opened in October 2021, and in September 2024 the team raised a $30M round (led by Accel) specifically to take Raycast cross-platform. The public beta of Raycast 2.0 — the first build that runs on both macOS and Windows from the same core — landed in May 2026.

The extension ecosystem is the part that makes Raycast hard to dislodge once you adopt it. Extensions are written in TypeScript and React against the @raycast/api npm package, hot-reload during development, and are reviewed before publishing to the Store. There are thousands of community and first-party extensions covering GitHub, Linear, Jira, Figma, Spotify, Notion, 1Password, Zoom, AWS, Vercel, Cloudflare, and most things a developer reaches for in a given day. Script Commands let you wire arbitrary shell, Python, or Node scripts straight into the launcher without writing a real extension.

The macOS app is free with a genuinely generous core: launcher, clipboard history (limited retention), snippets, window management, calculator, file search, calendar, and all community extensions. Pro ($8/user/month annual or $10 month-to-month) adds Raycast AI across OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, Google, and xAI with optional Bring-Your-Own-Key, cloud sync between Macs, unlimited clipboard history, custom themes, and the built-in translator. Advanced AI stacks $8 on top of Pro for higher-tier frontier models. Teams ($12/user/month) and Enterprise add shared snippets/quicklinks, SAML/SCIM, and AI governance.

The Windows 10/11 build is in public beta, distributed via WinGet and tracked on its own changelog; the team has stated feature parity with macOS as a Q4 2026 target. An iOS companion app exists for triggering commands and reading clipboard sync on the go. Raycast's UI is English-only — no native zh-CN or ja-JP localization — but the translation and dictionary extensions in the Store (Easydict, Youdao, Parrot, DeepL) cover most non-English workflows in practice.