Kind of embarrassing, but I never gave Alfred a real chance because of its look. The logo, the name, the whole vibe felt old, and I turned that into an opinion about the app without ever trying it.
Meanwhile I bought into everything around Raycast. The manifesto, the merch, a coffee roast with its own mini-documentary, a keyboard with a waitlist. None of that is evil. It’s a smart playbook, and it worked on me. Branded coffee doesn’t ship a better fuzzy finder, it builds something people want to belong to. And belonging buys a lot of patience when the pricing changes.
Arc was the same story. I picked it because it felt different, then The Browser Company moved on to Dia and stopped developing it. Turns out the early fans were the launch audience, never the target.
Now that vibe coding makes features and UIs easy to clone, I care less about polish and more about the business behind the app. I’d rather back a company happy to stay a good tool than one that needs to grow ten times bigger for its investors.
These days every licence I buy is basically a vote for a business model. Alfred, Things, DEVONthink, the Omni apps: small teams that skip the AI feature of the month and still feel like the same apps years later. Cultured Code has yet to release a coffee.
Raycast is still a good app, and good software should cost money. I just confused one specific style of branding with quality.
So yeah, I’m finally past my first impression and looking forward to Alfred 6. The boring future of software sounds good to me.
Source: r/Alfred · by /u/emagech