10-second screen clips that are actually 10 seconds of work. Hotkey, pick a region, record — the lightweight clip lands on your clipboard, ready to paste in a PR, ticket, Slack or docs. 800 KB, not 200 MB.
Press your shortcut and drag a box around the part of the screen you want — a button, a panel, a window, a stretch of terminal. No app to bring forward, no project to set up.
Lightcap captures just that region. Show the bug, the click, the animation — then stop. It's built for short clips, not 20-minute screencasts.
The optimised clip is encoded on-device and dropped straight onto your clipboard (and saved to a folder). ⌘V into a PR, a Jira ticket, Slack or your docs — done.
Hotkey, drag a region, record a few seconds — the optimised clip is encoded on-device and dropped straight onto your clipboard, plus saved to a folder. No project file, no editor, no “Export…” dialog. Just ⌘V into a PR, ticket, Slack or docs.
Region clips come out as optimised GIFs or H.265 MP4s — often well under a megabyte, not the 200 MB QuickTime hands you for the same ten seconds. The Slack preset caps resolution to ≤960px so a UI clip stays small; full-screen 4K naturally weighs more.
Pick where it's going and Lightcap sizes the clip to fit: Slack (<2 MB), GitHub (<10 MB) or Docs. Adaptive frame rate means it won't waste 60fps on a still terminal — it records what actually moves.
Top and tail a clip with a fast inline trim before it lands. Clicks get auto-highlighted so viewers can follow along, and your last 20 clips stay in a local history — one click to re-copy or open the folder. Everything on-device. One-time purchase.
Caps the clip's resolution so a UI or window recording drops straight into a Slack or Teams message without the “file too large” nag.
Sized to sit comfortably under GitHub's attachment limit, so you can drag a repro clip into a PR description or issue comment.
A higher-quality balance for Notion, Confluence or your own docs — sharper than the Slack cap, still far lighter than a raw recording.
| Lightcap | QuickTime | Kap | Gifox | Screen Studio | CleanShot X | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lightweight region clips (small files) | ✓ | ✗ ~200 MB/10s | ✓ | ✓ | ~ heavy renders | ✓ |
| Hotkey → clip on clipboard, no editor | ✓ | ✗ save dialog | ~ exports | ✓ | ✗ project + editor | ✓ |
| GIF and H.265 MP4 output | ✓ | ~ MP4 only | ✓ | ~ GIF focused | ✓ | ✓ |
| Slack / GitHub / Docs size presets | ✓ | ✗ | ~ manual | ~ manual | ~ export settings | ~ manual |
| Runs on-device — nothing leaves your Mac | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| One-time price | $19.99 | free | free | $14.99 · GIF only | $89–229 | ~$29 |
QuickTime is free but a ten-second region recording can balloon to ~200 MB, and there's no clipboard hand-off. Kap is excellent open-source but Electron-based and slower to fire up. Gifox is great and a bit cheaper, but GIF-focused. Screen Studio makes beautiful clips — with a project, an editor and a $89–229 price tag — while CleanShot X is a do-everything suite. Lightcap is deliberately narrow: hotkey → region → tiny clip on your clipboard, one-time $19.99, 100% on-device.
No. Recording, encoding, optimisation and trimming all run entirely on your Mac. Your screen recordings are never uploaded anywhere. The only network connections Lightcap ever makes are an update check and a one-off licence validation — never your clips. You can confirm this yourself with a firewall tool like Little Snitch or LuLu.
Optimised animated GIF and H.265 (HEVC) MP4. GIF is the most universally pasteable; H.265 MP4 gives you much smaller files at higher quality for places that accept video. You pick the default, and a size preset (Slack / GitHub / Docs) tunes the resolution and bitrate to fit where the clip is going.
Press the global shortcut and Lightcap immediately drops into region-select — drag a box around what you want, and recording starts. Stop with the same shortcut or the menu-bar control, and the finished clip lands on your clipboard. No window to bring forward, no project to create.
Two reasons. First, Lightcap is built for short region clips, not full-screen screencasts — the Slack preset caps resolution to ≤960px, so a UI clip stays tiny. Second, it uses an adaptive frame rate: a still terminal isn't recorded at 60fps, so you're not paying bytes for frames that don't change. A region clip is often well under a megabyte; a full-screen 4K recording will naturally be larger.
Not in version 1. Lightcap is focused on silent, lightweight clips for PRs, tickets and docs, where audio is just dead weight. Microphone and system-audio capture may come in a future free update for your version.
Yes. Lightcap is sold directly and distributed as a Developer ID app, notarized by Apple. That keeps it lightweight and lets it record the screen and write to your clipboard cleanly, while still being Gatekeeper-checked and safe to run. It will ask for the standard macOS Screen Recording permission the first time.
All the Macs you personally own, with a single licence. One purchase covers your whole setup — no per-seat counting.
Absolutely — a 14-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked. Payments are handled by Paddle; just reply to your receipt and we'll sort it out.
