Glaze Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR: Glaze is Raycast’s new AI agent that builds real, native Mac apps from a chat conversation: apps that live in your dock, work offline, and belong to you. The most credible chat-to-app product yet, but Mac-only with strict hardware requirements. Best for Mac users and teams who want custom tools without engineering time. Price: free 120-credit starter pack, Pro from $20/month. Rating: 8/10.

What is Glaze?

We found Glaze at the top of Product Hunt on July 3, 2026, where it finished #1 with over 550 points, and the traction is no accident. Glaze comes from Raycast, the company behind the Mac launcher that hundreds of thousands of professionals use daily, backed by $47.8M in funding including a $30M Series B led by Atomico, with angels like GitHub’s Thomas Dohmke and Shopify’s Tobi Lütke. This is not a weekend AI wrapper. It spent four months in private beta before going generally available, and Cursor, Linear, and Vercel already build internal tools with it.

The pitch: describe an app in a chat, and Glaze generates a real, standalone Mac application. Not a web page in a wrapper. An app that sits in your dock, launches instantly, works offline, and gets OS-level access to the file system, keyboard shortcuts, the menu bar, and background processes. You iterate on it conversationally, you own the result and its code, and you can publish it to a public store, share it unlisted, or push it to a private team store. It is a separate product from the Raycast launcher, with its own domain and its own pricing.

Glaze is Raycast’s entry in the “personal software” thesis: the idea that AI collapses the cost of building software so far that one-size-fits-all apps stop making sense, and everyone ends up running tools shaped exactly to their own work. Plenty of companies are chasing that thesis with web builders. Raycast’s angle is that personal software should feel personal, which on a Mac means native, instant, and offline, not another browser tab with a login. Six years of building the most-loved launcher on the platform is a credible qualification for that argument.

What Are Glaze’s Key Features?

Chat-to-native-app generation

Every AI app builder promises “describe it and it exists.” The difference here is what “it” is. Lovable, Bolt, and Replit produce web apps that live on a server. Glaze produces a native-feeling Mac app you install and keep. You refine it through chat and on-screen annotation tools, pointing at the thing you want changed rather than describing it blind. For personal utilities, dashboards, and internal tools, the difference in feel between a dock app and a browser tab is bigger than it sounds. A tool that opens instantly with a keyboard shortcut gets used; a bookmark you have to find does not. And because you own the generated code outright, there is no platform lock-in holding your app hostage if you ever leave.

Local-first and offline

Generated apps run entirely on your machine with no server required. That means no hosting bill, no latency, no “service unavailable” for the tool you built to track your own inventory. It also means your data stays local by default. Apps can still reach external APIs and local CLIs when you want them to; Raycast’s CEO says they “can connect to anything.”

Deep macOS integration

Glaze apps get capabilities web builders cannot offer: file system access, global keyboard shortcuts, menu bar apps, and background processes. That unlocks a class of utilities that actually feel native, like a menu bar tracker that watches a folder, or a global-hotkey scratchpad. The apps also integrate deeply with the new version of Raycast if you use it, though Glaze stands alone.

Three ways to distribute

A public Glaze store hosts community-built apps anyone can browse and install, free accounts included. Pro users can share apps unlisted, and Team plans get a private store for internal tools. Raycast itself runs support and sales processes on Glaze-built apps, which is the kind of dogfooding that suggests the distribution story is real rather than decorative.

How Much Does Glaze Cost?

Glaze is credit-based: credits are what the agent spends while building and editing apps. The free tier is a one-time 120-credit welcome pack. It does not refresh, so once it is spent, you can still browse and install apps but building stops until you upgrade. Pro costs $20 per month (currently marked down from $25) for 200 monthly credits, top-up purchases, and unlisted sharing. Team runs $30 per seat per month for the same 200 credits per seat plus a private team store and a 14-day trial. Unused monthly credits roll over for 2 months; purchased top-ups last 3. There is no annual discount yet.

That puts Glaze right in line with the AI-builder market: Lovable Pro is about $25 per month, Bolt Pro is $25, and Replit Core works out to $20 to $25. Nobody at this price point builds native desktop apps, though, so the comparison flatters Glaze. The real cost question is credit burn on complex apps, which only heavy use will answer.

Frame the price against the alternative and it looks different again. An internal tool built by a contractor starts at a few thousand dollars; an engineer’s week costs more. If Glaze’s 200 monthly credits ship even one working internal utility a month for a team, the $30 seat pays for itself faster than any tool in this review. The rollover rules take some sting out of slow months (unused monthly credits survive for 2 months), but the absence of an annual plan means no way to lock the discount in, and free-tier users should understand clearly: the 120 credits are a one-time allowance, not a monthly one. When they are gone, you are a Pro customer or a spectator.

Who is Glaze Best For?

Use Glaze if you are a Mac user with a list of “I wish I had a little app that…” ideas, or a team lead who wants internal tools (support dashboards, ops utilities, sales calculators) without opening an engineering project. Non-coders are the explicit target: if you can describe it, you can ship it to your own dock. Raycast fans get the deepest integration.

The customer evidence points the same way. Cursor, Linear, and Vercel, three of the most engineering-dense companies in software, use Glaze for internal tools, and Raycast runs its own support and sales tooling on it. When companies full of engineers choose chat-built apps over sprint tickets for their internal utilities, the message is not that they cannot code. It is that most internal tools never deserved engineering time in the first place.

Skip Glaze if you are on Windows or Linux; support is “planned down the road” and no more. Skip it too if your Mac is older: Glaze demands macOS Tahoe and Apple Silicon, full stop. And if what you actually need is a web product with users and a URL, Lovable or Bolt is the right tool; Glaze builds apps for you and your team, not your customers.

What Are the Best Glaze Alternatives?

Lovable is the fastest-growing chat-to-web-app builder, from about $25 per month for roughly 100 credits. It ships real web apps with hosting and auth, ideal when the goal is a product, not a personal tool.

Bolt.new offers Pro from $25 per month with 10M tokens that roll over. Strong for developers who want to see and edit the generated code in the browser as they go.

Replit starts at $20 per month billed annually and pairs its AI agent with a full cloud IDE and deployment platform. The most complete option when you want to grow from prototype into hosted production software.

Final Verdict: Is Glaze Worth It?

Glaze is the most convincing entry yet in the personal-software wave. The bet is that one-size-fits-all software ends where AI begins, and Raycast has the team, the funding, and six years of Mac craftsmanship to make that bet credible. Native apps, local-first execution, and real OS integration put it in a category the web-based builders cannot reach today, and at $20 it costs the same as they do.

The limits are sharp: one platform, aggressive hardware requirements, a free tier that is a taste rather than a plan, and a product that is only weeks out of beta. But the 120 free credits are enough to build something real and find out for yourself. If you own an Apple Silicon Mac on Tahoe, that is the easiest recommendation in this batch: spend the free pack, build the little app you always wanted, and see if you can go back to living without it.

The bigger picture is what earns the 8. Raycast is not experimenting here; it is restructuring its own support and sales operations around apps its customers can also build. If the credit economics stay sane and the promised Windows expansion of the wider Raycast platform ever reaches Glaze, this stops being a Mac curiosity and becomes the default way small teams make their own tools. Get in while the store is still small enough to be interesting.