Kap costs nothing and has not shipped a release since October 2022

Kap scores 68, in our Usable band, which is the same total Cap's free plan reaches by an entirely different route. Cap gets there with a rich free tier and a five-minute wall; Kap gets there with no wall at all and a deliberately tiny feature set.

The pillar spread tells the story better than the total. Freedom is close to the top of this category, because MIT is the most permissive licence in the file: nothing metered, nothing branded, no email address asked for, and if the project stays quiet anyone can fork it. Feature depth is the lowest score we have given any free tool in this category, because against what this category gives away free, drag-record-trim-export is thin. Screenity, ShareX and OBS Studio all do more for the same price of nothing.

Generosity is high but discounted, and the discount is the calendar rather than a quota.

The limitation that should decide your answer is not in the product, it is in the release history. Kap's last tagged release is v3.6.0, October 2022. We flag it as unmaintained. That does not mean it is broken today, and plenty of people still use it happily, but it does mean:

• Nobody is testing it against new macOS releases. Check it runs on your version before you build a habit around it, and expect no fix if a future update breaks it.
• No security or bug fixes are arriving. For a screen recorder with capture permissions, that is a fair thing to weigh rather than ignore.
• The MIT licence is the mitigation. Anyone can fork it and keep it alive, which is genuinely more than most abandoned apps offer, but nobody has to.

Beyond maintenance, the free product has real gaps as of July 2026, and none of them are paywalls because there is nothing to pay for:

• macOS only, with no Windows or Linux build.
• No cloud hosting and no share links. You get a file and you upload it yourself.
• Editing is trimming. No annotation, no zoom, no captions, no multi-scene work.
• Long recordings are not its strength, given the web-technology architecture, which uses more memory than a fully native recorder on extended takes.

There is no ladder, no upgrade and no vendor. MIT licensed, free forever, and the price will never change because there is no one to change it. That much is settled.

What replaces a pricing decision here is a succession decision. Because development is quiet, the useful planning question is what you move to when Kap eventually stops working, not what you pay when you outgrow it. On macOS, the free answers are OBS Studio for anything long or high quality, which is also free with no tier at all, and Cap for the record-and-send-a-link workflow, whose free tier caps recordings at five minutes and whose Desktop License is $29 a year. Neither of those is a downgrade in capability; both are heavier to use for a ten-second GIF, which is exactly what Kap is good at.

Read the plan card below as the whole commercial story: one free tier, no limits, no successor tier. The cost of Kap is not money, it is the risk that one morning your Mac updates and the fastest tool in your workflow stops opening.

Free with limits, and the limit is time rather than usage. Nothing is metered, nothing is branded and nothing expires by design; what expires is compatibility, because the last tagged release is from October 2022 and no one is currently maintaining it against new versions of macOS.

Who can genuinely use it today: a Mac user who wants a GIF for a pull request, an issue or a chat thread right now, with no account and no ceremony. For that job nothing else here is faster, and the price is zero forever. Keep it as the quick-capture tool in a kit that also has something maintained in it.

Who should not build on it: anyone recording client work, anything long, anything you need to still be able to produce next year, or anyone who would be stuck if it stopped launching after a system update. Do not make an unmaintained app load-bearing.

For a maintained free alternative on macOS, Screenity's free plan records unlimited local video with annotation in Chrome, and free Kap alternatives lists the rest. The ranked category is at best free video recording tools.