Notchy vs NotchBay: Free Notch App vs Paid (2026)

#The disclosure, upfront

NotchBay is this site's own app, so the bias is declared up front. Notchy belongs to notchy.dev, and it is not a stripped-down teaser: its public list runs to music with synced lyrics, a Pomodoro timer, an OCR clipboard, a file shelf, system HUDs, AirPods battery, a privacy indicator and an AI usage tracker, for nothing. Every Notchy row below was read off notchy.dev in July 2026; where a claim is fuzzy, the table is the tiebreaker. For the category as a whole rather than these two apps, start with the Dynamic Island for Mac guide.

#Feature by feature

NotchBay rows come from its own feature list and its own limits. Notchy rows come from notchy.dev's public feature list as read in July 2026; Notchy ships often, so reverify any single row there before you decide.

#The real difference: free breadth vs the meeting layer

Read the table and one thing is obvious: this is not a case where the paid app simply does more. Notchy wins several rows outright, price included, and matches NotchBay on the everyday things most people open a notch app for. So the question is not which app has the longer feature list, because on raw count Notchy often does.

The question is narrower: do you need the three things NotchBay adds on top? Joining and driving video calls from the notch, dictating text into any app on-device, and turning a dropped file into a share link. If those are your day, they are worth paying for. If they are not, Notchy already covers the ground you actually stand on, for free.

#Where Notchy beats NotchBay

Five specifics, not adjectives.

• It costs nothing. notchy.dev lists it as free forever. NotchBay is a paid one-time purchase, and no amount of feature argument changes that a free app is free.
• It runs on far more Macs. Notchy's floor is macOS 13 Ventura. NotchBay's is macOS 26 (Tahoe), so if your Mac is not on Apple's Tahoe compatibility list, or you are staying on Sequoia for work reasons, NotchBay is not an option at any price. Apple's macOS Tahoe compatibility page settles that in about ten seconds.
• Its AI usage tracker covers more tools. Notchy tracks Claude, Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT and DeepSeek. NotchBay tracks one: Claude's 5-hour and weekly plan bars, read locally from the ~/.claude logs with no account and no API. Deeper on Claude, blind to the other four.
• It has a utility grab-bag NotchBay does not. Image conversion, zipping, a terminal, an eyedropper. NotchBay ships none of those and is not trying to.
• Chained Pomodoro sessions and synced lyrics. NotchBay has a focus timer and a media card; Notchy's versions of both go further.

That list is the whole case for Notchy: on breadth it wins, and it wins at zero cost.

#Where they overlap more than you'd expect

People assume a paid notch app must out-feature a free one on the fundamentals. Here they mostly tie, and a fair comparison should not sell an upgrade that is already free.

Clipboard with OCR. Both keep a clipboard history and run OCR on screenshots, so you can find the screenshot with the invoice number by typing part of the number. NotchBay keeps 60 clips sorted by type plus pinned clips that never expire; Notchy exposes its history with smart actions and pinning. A genuine tie, and not a reason to switch in either direction. If the clipboard is the whole reason you are here, Mac clipboard history covers the dedicated tools, and the best Mac notch apps covers the wider field.

Privacy and battery. Camera and mic indicators, AirPods battery, device battery for mouse and keyboard: both do these. NotchBay draws model-accurate device art on connect, which is polish, not a new capability. Do not pay for polish you would not notice.

#Running meetings from the notch

This is the section where NotchBay earns its price, and it is worth being precise about what it does that Notchy, per its public feature list, does not.

The next calendar event appears in the island and joins in one tap. Once the call is running, the island swaps to call controls: mute, camera, screen share and leave, for Zoom and Google Meet, driven through Apple's accessibility APIs. Notchy has a call island for FaceTime and phone calls, which is genuinely useful, but it is a different thing from pressing Zoom's own mute button for you.

Two caveats belong in the same breath as the feature. Those controls need Accessibility permission granted in System Settings, because that is how one app drives another's buttons. And Meet is driven through a Chromium browser, so Chrome, Brave and Comet work while Safari does not.

Alongside that sit two more paid-layer features. On-device dictation types speech into whatever field has focus, transcribed by Apple's SpeechAnalyzer on the Mac itself, which is also why NotchBay requires macOS Tahoe. And dropping a file on the notch uploads it to your own Google Drive and hands back a share link, with AirDrop and a QR code as the other two routes. How much this layer is worth depends entirely on how many meetings you actually run.

#Pricing and requirements

Prices and system requirements change faster than anything else in a comparison, so this section states only what the public pages showed as of July 2026 and points back to the source for the rest.

Notchy lists itself as free forever and native, running on macOS 13 Ventura and later, on Apple Silicon, and it appears as a floating pill on displays without a notch. Confirm the current terms on notchy.dev, since a free app can always change how it is funded.

NotchBay is a $9 one-time purchase with a 14-day money-back guarantee and no subscription, which matters because there is no free tier and no self-serve trial to poke at first. It requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later because the dictation engine ships with that release, and it is built for the notched machines: MacBook Pro from 2021 onward and MacBook Air from the M2 generation onward, with a small floating pill on other Macs and external displays. For the paid-versus-paid question, the sibling NotchBay vs NotchNook comparison and the NotchNook fact page cover the other obvious candidate. An afternoon with each app tells you more than any table here.

#Frequently asked questions