CleanShot X Deal

Get 10% off any plan using our exclusive discount code EFFICIENT at checkout.

We've worked directly with the Cleanshot X team to get you an exclusive 10% off discount code (by using the discount code at checkout).

While other websites might lead you to believe you're locking in a lifetime deal for CleanShot X by purchasing only through their website, we're here to tell you that CleanShot has two ways to purchase it, and one of those options is just simply a lifetime "deal".

There's actually a few options available here, and we tried them all, so let's cover the positives and negatives of each below ⤵

For a one-time payment of $29, you get the Mac app forever, one year of updates (with an optional $19/yr to lock in another year of updates), and 1 GB of cloud storage. Use our discount code EFFICIENT to get 10% off your purchase.

This is actually what we purchased ourselves for our entire team, and we all use CleanShot daily, probably even 5+ times per day on average. Their actual monthly option, AKA Cloud Pro just makes it a bit too difficult to justify the pricing for the benefits it comes with.

The truth of the matter is the desktop app isn't all too different from how it was a year ago, some quality of life features for sure, but at the 1–year mark, most can likely justify not upgrading for another year of updates.

That said, we updated, because heck, we love software and want to be on the newest version (I mean we are a software review site and all).

The math just makes sense here though, you're essentially paying $1.58/mo for updates instead of the $10/mo, and you get to choose when you do the paid update, so maybe you let CleanShot ride for another 3–6 months without updates, then you pull the trigger because they just released a cool new feature relevant to you and then you can get another year of updates.

I challenged myself to use CleanShot and only backup videos and screenshots that were actually useful/important to reference/share, using a tool like Supercut when longer video recordings were needed to actually be hosted.

What I realized that even when I was doing screen recordings that would take up most of the CleanShot Cloud storage, well, it was more to share on Slack, X, and forums, all of which take the video upload and there's actually no need to have it hosted on CleanShot Cloud.

So here I am a year in and only having used some 300MB of storage, and the truth of the matter is I could get rid of some of the larger video recordings. I'm genuinely looking for reason to use CleanShot Cloud more, but can't find it 😅

This one almost got me, I'll admit it—there's just something to a nice short link for sharing instead of using share.cleanshot.com—that said, as mentioned above in the limited storage section, I just found that our entire team was more just using the CleanShot App as the screenshot/recording tool, and then sharing it to Slack/Social media (which it uploads to), and the need for actually hosting it in the cloud has just continued to make less and less sense.

The truth of the matter is I really tried justifying this one, but just couldn't make it make sense.

For $10/user/yr (or $96/user/yr), you get the same desktop app, unlimited updates, unlimited cloud storage, and custom domain and branding features, along with self destruct and password protected link control (the latter can actually be handled externally with more of a link shortening service like Dub Links by the way).

Well, the short answer here is that we've not been able to justify it, and we absolutely adore CleanShot, use it daily, and recommend it to everyone.

You can read more about why we don't feel CleanShot's subscription pricing is worth it over their lifetime deal option.

So here I am a year in and only having used some 300MB of storage, and the truth of the matter is I could get rid of some of the larger video recordings.

Get CleanShot X. (Be sure to use our discount code to snag an extra 10% off!)

Okay, this one was super tempting, but resulted in me wasting a ton of time, only to realize that it just didn't make any sense.

You can get CleanShot + Cloud Pro as a part of your Setapp subscription (which starts at $9.99/user/mo), sounds great, right? Well...

This is where you learn that it comes with it some important restrictions that I just couldn't wrap my head around:

1. You must tie in your CleanShot account into your Setapp account, so if you ever cancel your Setapp account, you're unable to roll over your past data into a proper CleanShot Cloud account—You're stuck with Setapp.
2. They limit the CleanShot Cloud to only 10GB of uploads (so if you're backing up screen recordings at all, you're actually going to hit that potentially pretty quickly as those range anywhere from 20–100MB in file size, so 100–500 screen recordings before you're fully maxed out with no path to go).
3. It's a bit of a confusing and kludgy sign-up and linking process.

I had actually gone through all of the work to get Setapp set up and configured with CleanShot before I realized the small limitations placed here and there, which just made no sense—the lock-in is high, and the restrictions are strategic since of that $9.99, only a small amount is actually going to CleanShot, so if you're mainly getting Setapp just for CleanShot and maybe one other tool, you might be best to look elsewhere.

There is none. It's the magic of how affiliate partnerships work (well... sometimes).