Cotypist alternatives in 2026: no-subscription local Mac autocomplete, compared honestly

Cotypist showed the Mac world that system-wide sentence autocomplete — ghost text you accept with Tab, in every app — could actually work. If you're here, it's probably because it moved to a subscription and you're wondering what else exists. Here is the honest map.

First, credit where it's due

Cotypist is the pioneer of this category and an excellent, mature product — it earned its wide press coverage. The reason people search for alternatives is not quality; it's the pricing change: Cotypist now offers roughly 100 completions per day for free, and unlimited use requires a subscription of about $6–9 per month. A hundred completions sounds like a lot until you realize a fluent autocomplete user accepts suggestions dozens of times an hour. For many people the free tier runs out before lunch, and not everyone wants another monthly line on the credit-card statement for a typing tool.

So the real question is: what are you optimizing for — the most mature product, a one-time price, or no subscription? And do you want autocomplete alone, or autocomplete plus other writing help?

The comparison table

Honest guidance: who should pick which

• Pick Cotypist if you want the most mature, battle-tested product in the category and a subscription doesn't bother you. It invented this experience and it shows.
• Pick Typeahead if your rule is “I buy software once”: ~$79 up front, no recurring fee.
• Pick Wysp if you want free autocomplete and nothing else — it positions itself squarely as the no-subscription alternative to Cotypist. (Smaller challengers like Cotabby, TypeAssist and SpellType exist too, if you enjoy exploring.)
• Pick Souffleuse if you want autocomplete without a subscription with no daily limit, plus translation while you type and tone rewriting, all running 100% locally — and you're fine with a French-first interface. The app is made in France; its menus are in French, but the suggestions follow whatever language you type, English very much included.

What Souffleuse actually is, in one paragraph

Souffleuse is a menu-bar app for Apple Silicon Macs (macOS Sonoma and later) that runs a small language model on your machine. As you type in almost any app — Mail, Notes, Messages, Safari or Chrome, Slack, Pages, Bear, Obsidian — the rest of your sentence appears in grey under the cursor; Tab accepts it word by word or in chunks, Esc clears it, and it also fixes typos in passing. Typing // summons translation or a tone rewrite. Nothing you write is ever sent over the internet: the only connection the app makes is downloading its model once at setup, then it works fully offline. It's a ~7.5 MB DMG, notarized by Apple, no account required. A usage ledger shows you the keystrokes and minutes it saved — kept locally, visible to you alone. In short: a privacy-first take on the idea Cotypist pioneered.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free alternative to Cotypist?

Yes, two notable ones. Wysp is free and positions itself as a no-subscription alternative focused on autocomplete. Souffleuse Studio is a one-time purchase from €29, with no daily limit, and adds translation-while-typing and tone rewriting on top of system-wide autocomplete — all running locally on your Mac.

Does Souffleuse have a daily limit?

No. Souffleuse Studio is a one-time purchase from €29, with no daily quota, no account requirement, and no subscription.

Is Souffleuse really 100% local?

Yes, by architecture. A small language model runs on your Mac's Apple Silicon chip via llama.cpp and Metal. The only network connection the app ever makes is downloading the model once at setup; after that it works fully offline, with no account and no telemetry. Secure fields such as passwords are ignored by construction.