HeyClicky review: what it does, what it costs, and how it compares

For a lot of people, yes. HeyClicky does one thing very well: you press a hotkey, ask out loud about what's on your screen, and it shows you, drawing on the screen to point the way. Its free plan is real, Pro gives unlimited talk for $20 a month, and its agents now work with your apps, on a schedule, in the background.

It's a weaker fit if any of these matter to you:

• You want dictation that runs on your Mac and works offline. HeyClicky's trust page says everything is processed in the cloud.
• You want calls recorded and written down, or a place to keep documents and study. HeyClicky doesn't do either.
• You'd rather an assistant keep nothing about your screen. HeyClicky keeps the AI's analysis of each screenshot, and your prompt.

We make Koi, the app closest to HeyClicky, so read this with that in mind. Koi loses to it in places, and we say where: Koi has no free plan, no MCP connections, no routines, and no agents that work in the background. Everything about HeyClicky here comes from its own site, pricing page, trust page and changelog, checked October 16, 2026. We didn't run timed tests.

HeyClicky, formerly Clicky, calls itself an AI buddy that lives on your Mac. It looks at your screen only when you press its hotkey, and from there you use it in one of two ways.

• Talk. Ask out loud and it walks you through what you're working on, drawing right on the screen to point the way. Since July you can point, circle or scribble on the screen yourself to show it what you mean, and since August its walkthroughs run up to 15 steps.
• Agents. Say “heyclicky agent” and it does the task for you. Before it uses your Mac it asks: Allow once, Always allow, or Not now. Long agent tasks can be set to always approve.

The agent side has grown fast. On September 12 it got Clickys: named agents, each with its own memory, conversations and files, plus routines that run while the app is open and custom MCP connections. On September 24 its agents started working without moving your real pointer. On October 2 it learned to connect several accounts per app, labelled Work or Personal. There's dictation too, held on Fn + Control when it shipped in July, in 50+ languages.

It needs macOS Sonoma 14.2 or later. Windows has a waitlist; the site says it's coming. HeyClicky is made by Humansongs, Inc., founded by Farza, and its homepage claims 25,000+ users.

Yes. HeyClicky counts two things: talk, the conversation, and agent messages, where it does the work. Here's what each plan gets, from its pricing page.

A yearly switch on the page says 20% off but shows no yearly price. Students who send a school email or ID get 50% off their first month of Pro. There's no free trial, since Free is the trial, and you cancel in one click and keep access to the end of the cycle. Run out of agent messages and talk keeps working; agents wait for the next cycle. Since September 24 there's a referral program too: friends get 25% off, and you get 25% of their plan.

Koi prices differently. There's no free plan: Pro is $20 a month, or $192 a year, after a 3-day free trial that needs a card. Koi meters its assistant and shows what you've used as a percentage, never messages, while dictation and recorded calls are unlimited on every plan. Lifetime is paid once, $59 for the first 25 buyers, rising to $199, with Koi credit worth 20% of the price that never expires. All of it is on Koi's pricing page.

HeyClicky's trust page is short and direct, which deserves credit. In brief:

• It sees your screen only when you press the hotkey. Nothing else runs in the background, no keystroke, clipboard or file tracking, and quitting the app leaves no helpers running.
• Raw screenshots are never stored; they're gone once processed. The AI's analysis of the screenshot and your prompt are kept.
• Nothing is done locally. Requests go to Anthropic or OpenAI, and its analytics and crash tools never see your screen.
• It never trains on your data, and says its AI providers' terms don't allow them to either.
• Once a day, while the app is open, it reads your connected apps, read only, for morning suggestions. You can turn that off.
• It has no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 yet, and it deletes your data when you ask.

Is HeyClicky legit, then? It's a real company with a public changelog that ships every week or two, and nothing on its trust page is alarming. The trade is the usual one for a cloud assistant: what you show it leaves your Mac, and a written summary of it stays on their servers. The worries people raise are about that. On its Product Hunt page, commenters call the always-visible buddy a double-edged sword and worry about an agent doing something odd on their Mac.

For comparison, during a call with Koi your voice goes to the AI provider with no id for your account, and a picture of the screen goes with each question unless you switch that to only when you ask, or never. Koi's server keeps what the call cost, not what was said or shown, and what Koi remembers about you stays on your Mac. Dictation never goes online at all. The details are on our trust page.

The two are the closest apps in this space: a voice you call on a Mac, that sees the screen and marks it up. They split on almost everything around that.

• A free plan. 25 talk and 25 agent messages come back every month. Koi has only a 3-day trial of Pro, and it needs a card.
• Unlimited talk on Pro. Koi meters its assistant on every plan.
• Agents in the background. HeyClicky's work without moving your pointer, and its routines run on a schedule. Koi borrows your pointer for each press and does nothing on a schedule.
• Named agents and connectors. Clickys each keep their own memory and files, and custom MCP connections plug in more tools. Koi has neither.
• A referral program that pays you, and a Windows version on the way. Koi is Mac only.

• Dictation on your Mac. Tap Fn + ⌥ in any app: Whisper runs on the Mac, works offline, detects 57 languages and is unlimited on every plan.
• Calls recorded with no bot. Tap Fn + ⌃ and pick Online call or In person. You and Them are written down apart on your Mac, with the screen's video, and notes come only with a yes.
• A real place for the results: documents with tables, charts and LaTeX, flashcards, a calendar, and Study mode, which teaches rather than answers.
• Hard lines, enforced in the app. It never buys, pays, sends, posts, deletes, signs in or types a password, and text on a web page is never an instruction to it.
• Less kept. Koi's server keeps what a call cost, never a summary of your screen, and memory stays on your Mac.
• A Lifetime plan, paid once, if you'd rather not subscribe.

It works the same way to start: tap Fn + ⌘ once and talk. Koi answers out loud, and hangs up after 7 quiet seconds (not while it's talking or working) or when you tap the keys again. If what you really want is an assistant that does the clicking, our guide to an AI that controls your Mac sets out what Koi will and won't do.

Not on Windows yet; there's a waitlist. The open-source part is the first version. Farza put Clicky on GitHub under the MIT license, and the README says that code stays open while newer features stay private. It had 7,714 stars and 1,542 forks on October 16, 2026, and its last push was April 28. You build it yourself in Xcode and bring your own Anthropic, AssemblyAI and ElevenLabs keys.

Some forks went further. One, clicky-windows, describes itself as a free, offline assistant for Windows that runs on local models through Ollama. None of them is the app on heyclicky.com.

• You want something free, today? HeyClicky.
• You want agents that keep working with Gmail, Notion or your calendar while you do something else? HeyClicky.
• You want help on the screen plus dictation that works offline, calls written down on your Mac and somewhere to keep it all? Koi.
• You want hard limits on what an assistant can do with your Mac, whatever it's told? Koi.
• You're a student who wants to learn rather than copy? Either can walk you through; Koi's Study mode is built for it.

The fairest test is a day of real work with each. HeyClicky's free plan makes that easy; Koi's trial is 3 days. For more options, see HeyClicky alternatives, the Highlight AI alternatives, and our guide to an AI tutor that sees your screen.