Cortex remembers everything you copy — and actually understands it. Summaries, intents and structure, powered by Apple Intelligence. Entirely on your Mac. Entirely yours.
Free for early birds — core features are a lifetime purchase, never a subscription · macOS 26+ · Apple Silicon · No account, no cloud
Keyboard-first, from the first keystroke
Cortex quietly captures what you copy — and turns a flat history into an organized, searchable library.
Text, links, tables, images, files — everything lands in your history with its source app and timestamp. Duplicates get bumped, not duplicated.
Copied an invoice? Cortex extracts the fields. A rambling deal email? You get the stage, the numbers and the next step. On-device, in seconds.
File entries into nested groups like Sales/Q1 with one hotkey. Your clipboard becomes a knowledge base instead of a junk drawer.
Built-in OCR turns screenshots into searchable text. PDFs and Word documents resolve to clean text automatically — scans included.
Every entry is a human-readable Markdown file in a folder you choose. Sync it with iCloud, grep it, version it. No lock-in, ever.
Cortex ships an MCP server: Claude Desktop and other AI tools can search, read and organize your clipboard library — with your permission.
Hit ⌘⇧V anywhere. Type three letters. Hit ⏎. Done — the picker finds it, pastes it and gets out of your way.
Cortex is designed hands-on-keys: global hotkeys for capturing, grouping and pasting — and a built-in cheat sheet so you never have to memorize them.
Your clipboard is the most sensitive data stream on your Mac. Cortex treats it that way: there is no server, no account, no telemetry — because there’s simply no code for any of it.
No anonymous corporation, no support bots. Cortex is built in Paderborn by two people who use it every single day — and read every email themselves.
Founder of Techmanufaktur · Product & Ideas
Drives the product ideas behind Cortex — from the clipboard as a knowledge base to the AI pipeline. Believes your data belongs in files you own, not in someone else’s database.
hello@techmanufaktur.de
Founder of Techmanufaktur · Implementation & Engineering
Turns those ideas into code — from the capture engine to the on-device AI. Pushes every build to its limits before you ever see it.
hello@techmanufaktur.de“A clipboard manager sees everything you copy. You should know exactly who builds it — and be able to write to them.” — Daniel
No. Capture, search, OCR and AI all run locally. The only network access Cortex has is fetching link previews when you copy a URL — and you can turn that off.
You define “intents” — situations like Invoice or Deal Update with a prompt each. When you run AI on an entry, Cortex detects the matching intent and applies your prompt: extract fields, summarize, translate, reformat. All with Apple’s on-device foundation model.
macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon. AI features require Apple Intelligence to be enabled; everything else works without it.
As Markdown files (plus attachments) in a folder you control. Point it at iCloud Drive and your library syncs across Macs — no proprietary database involved.
Cortex includes a small MCP server binary. Add one snippet to your Claude Desktop config, and Claude can list, search, read, create and organize entries in your library. It runs locally over stdio.
Right now, yes: the early-bird release is 100% off. And here’s the promise — core functionality is a one-time lifetime purchase, never a subscription. What you get today stays yours. Much further down the road, a subscription may be offered for optional premium add-ons only.