Default Folder X: what the free tier covers

Most questions about the cost of a Mac utility are really questions about the free tier: how much can be done without paying, and at what point does the software start asking. For Default Folder X the answer is unusually short. There is no reduced free version. What exists is a 30 day trial with every feature switched on, and after that the choice is to buy or to stop. That makes the pricing page easy to read and the decision harder to postpone, so it is worth knowing exactly what the numbers are and which conditions move them.

There is no free tier, only thirty days

The download section of the vendor site says one thing about cost: try it free for 30 days. There is no feature table splitting free rows from paid rows, because there is no free product to describe. Anyone searching for the boundary between the two halves is looking for something that was never built.

This is a different model from the dual pane file managers that Default Folder X is often compared against, several of which keep a permanently free build and place remote storage, device mounting, or archive formats behind a paid pack. The reason for the difference is visible in the feature list. Almost everything this utility does happens inside a single file dialog, and removing part of that would make the trial meaningless. A navigation menu that works but a search window that does not would not tell anyone whether the product is worth buying.

The practical consequence is that the evaluation has a deadline. Thirty days is generous by the standards of Mac utilities, but it is still a window, and how it is spent determines whether the eventual decision is informed or arbitrary.

What the thirty days include

The trial is not restricted, which means all five of the main behaviours can be tested. The Navigation Assistant, with hierarchical menus of recent, favourite, and open folders. Quick Search, reached with Command plus Shift plus Space. Finder click, where clicking a visible Finder window sends the dialog to that folder. The recall behaviour that reselects the last file used and remembers the folder being saved into repeatedly. Per application default folders.

The Finder side of the product is included as well: the drawer below a Finder window, filing by dragging onto the menu bar icon, and the toolbar buttons, which since version 5.5.7 also appear in Path Finder's toolbar if that is installed.

One thing worth doing on the first day rather than the last is checking that the tool reaches the applications that actually matter. The vendor states that every native macOS application is supported, and that the exceptions are applications built on cross platform frameworks such as QT or Java which do not implement the macOS Accessibility API correctly. Calibre is named as a case that hangs for some users. If the five applications opened most often during a working week include one of those, the pricing question resolves itself before it starts.

The purchase price, and how licenses are counted

Two numbers appear in the purchase section. A single user license is $39.95. Buying two or more brings the price to $34.95 each, a $5 difference that begins at the second license. Educational discounts are offered as a separate route.

The counting rule is the part that gets misread. The license is described as single user, which means it is bought per person rather than per machine. The published FAQ is explicit: a license may be entered on more than one Mac as long as the same person is the sole user of those machines.

• A desktop and a laptop used by one person needs one license.
• One Mac shared by two people with separate accounts needs two.
• An office of three people needs three, and qualifies for the $34.95 rate.

Estimating by machine count therefore overstates the cost for individuals and understates it for shared hardware. This is the reverse of how many competing utilities are licensed, so a migration estimate built from an existing per seat spreadsheet will come out wrong in both directions.

Upgrade pricing depends on the date of the last purchase

For anyone who already owns an older version, the cost of moving to version 6 is determined by when the previous license was bought. The published table has three rows.

Date of previous purchase	Upgrade price
On or after 1 March 2023	Free
1 September 2022 to 1 March 2023	$9.95
Before 1 September 2022	$19.95

When the upgrade is free, installing version 6 and entering the existing license number is the whole process. When it is not, the email address or license number from the old purchase is required to verify eligibility, and a request form exists for anyone who has lost the number. Version 6 will also check an old number entered in the General tab of its settings and report whether an upgrade is owed.

The billing model is stated directly on that page.

Upgrades are a one-time purchase, NOT a subscription, and entitle you to free updates until the next major release (typically 5-7 years). Source: stclairsoft.com

The Setapp route changes the shape of the payment

Default Folder X is also distributed through Setapp. The published FAQ confirms this indirectly but repeatedly: several Terminal fixes carry a note explaining that the Setapp build uses the identifier com.stclairsoft.DefaultFolderX5-setapp instead of the standard one.

Setapp is billed monthly. The Mac plan is $14.99 per month plus tax, the Mac and iOS plan is $18.99, and the Power User plan covering four Macs and four iOS devices is $22.99. Annual billing is advertised as saving up to 40 percent, and the trial is seven days rather than thirty.

Route	Payment shape	Price
Vendor site, one license	Once	$39.95
Vendor site, two or more	Once	$34.95 each
Vendor site, upgrade to v6	Once	Free, $9.95, or $19.95
Setapp, Mac plan	Monthly	$14.99 per month

The comparison cannot be settled by looking at this one application. Setapp includes hundreds of others, so the calculation depends on how many of them would genuinely get used. For a person who wants this utility and nothing else, three months of the Mac plan is $44.97, which already passes the one time price, and twelve months is $179.88. That figure is arithmetic on published prices, not a measurement.

Dividing the price by the years it is likely to last

A one time price only becomes a small annual number if the software survives several macOS releases. The vendor puts the interval between major versions at five to seven years, which turns $39.95 into roughly $7.99 per year at the short end and $5.70 at the long end. Again, that is division, not evidence.

The evidence sits in the version table, which reaches further back than most. Release 6.3 covers macOS 27 down to 10.13. Version 5.7.8 still runs on macOS 13 and earlier, 5.6.6 covers 10.12 and 10.11, 4.7.4 covers 10.10 down to 10.6, 4.5.12 handles PowerPC machines, and 4.3.10 runs on macOS 10.4. Builds are published for systems more than twenty years old, and the copyright line on the site starts at 1996. A five year assumption is supported by that record rather than by a promise.

The counterweight is that only 6.3 is officially supported. Older releases are described as working on older systems, not as maintained, so anyone planning to keep a machine on an older OS for cost reasons should factor in that support conversations will be different.

The permission prompts are part of the cost

A price list is not the only thing to weigh before installing. Default Folder X requests four permissions: Accessibility, Full Disk Access, AppleEvents, and screen recording. On a personal machine those are four dialogs and a minute of clicking. On a machine administered by someone else, they are an approval conversation, and screen recording is the one that raises questions.

The documented reason is specific. In some situations the utility has to operate a menu inside a file dialog, so it captures an image of the dialog and displays that image in front of the real one for a fraction of a second to hide the activity. It also uses an image to detect whether a dialog is drawing in Dark Mode, because no macOS API reports that. The published FAQ states that the capture is held in RAM, never written to a file, and destroyed immediately after use, and it offers a Terminal setting that allows launching without the permission at the cost of seeing the menus and yellow placeholder windows.

Two related costs belong in the same estimate. The privacy database that macOS uses to record these grants can become corrupted, and the documented repair involves resetting entries with tccutil and restarting the Mac. Separately, a utility called BetterMouse has a click through option that makes the controls vanish when clicked, fixed by turning that option off. Neither is expensive, but both are time, and time spent on permissions is part of what the $39.95 actually buys.

What to measure during the trial

Three counts taken during the thirty days will settle the question. The first is how often a Save dialog required hunting for a destination. The second is how often the Finder had to be visited to rename, inspect, or delete something that a dialog was already showing. Both of those are the numbers the tool acts on directly, and both tend to be higher than people expect.

The third count is the one that decides the outcome, and it is the one nobody takes. It is the number of times attention moved between the file browser, the terminal, and whatever is being consulted for answers. That number is untouched by this purchase. Someone who only tracks the first two counts will buy, because dialogs genuinely do get faster. Someone whose third count dwarfs the other two will buy and remain stuck.

It also helps to start the trial at the beginning of a month rather than on installation day. Invoicing weeks, delivery weeks, and weeks when large batches of material arrive all have different save patterns, and a trial that begins on the first of the month contains all of them.

What to change first

Take the third count before opening the purchase page. If file dialogs are where the day is being spent, $39.95 once is a reasonable trade and the licensing rule means a second Mac adds nothing.

If the day is being spent moving between windows instead, no amount of dialog improvement will register, and the category of tool needs revisiting rather than the price. The comparison of file managers sets out that axis, and what happens when the desk is empty covers the other interval that pricing tables leave out, which is the time an agent spends waiting for an answer nobody is there to give. Atriens lists its own prices in all three shapes, monthly, annual, and one time, so the two approaches can be compared on the same page.