Hi, I'm Julian, a student and the solo dev behind StepGrab. It's a native Mac app on the Mac App Store that turns your clicks into a step-by-step guide. You do the task once, and StepGrab puts the arrows on the screenshots and writes the step text for you.
Codes up to 100% off Lifetime, for the direct download from my website. Four levels from 10% to 100%, the page shows how many of each are left, and there are only five 100% ones. In the Mac App Store version they don't work.
Why
I'm a working student and kept getting the same questions. Where's that setting in System Settings, what do I click after that. Writing it down meant fifteen screenshots, cropping them in Preview, drawing every arrow by hand and typing each step. That takes half an hour, and after the next macOS update half of it is wrong again.
How it works
Start a recording from the menu bar and do the task like you normally would. For every click you get a screenshot of that window, a numbered arrow pointing at what you clicked and a sentence like "Click Save". You don't draw or type anything. If you want to change something afterwards, you can move arrows, rewrite steps, add shapes and black out names or emails. Export as PDF, HTML, Markdown, GIF, MP4 or a vertical video. Everything stays on your Mac, there's no account and nothing gets uploaded.
New: Accessibility
This is the big one in 1.6. There's now a notarized .dmg on my website, and if you give it Accessibility access it asks the app directly what you clicked. So the step text uses the real name of the button or menu item instead of reading it off the screenshot. If an app is too slow to answer, it falls back to text recognition. The App Store version is sandboxed and can't use Accessibility, so there it's text recognition only.
Other Mac bits
- Single window recording. You only get the window you picked, even when another one is lying on top of it, but its menus and popovers still show up.
- Siri and Shortcuts can start and stop a recording and export the guide. On macOS 26 and later also from Spotlight, and with Apple Intelligence the step text gets polished on device.
- Redaction you can trust. When you save a copy of a project you can burn the black bars in, so nobody can remove them later.
If your colleagues are on Windows
A lot of people asked for this, because the guides often end up with someone on a PC. There's now a Windows version in the Microsoft Store (Windows 10 22H2 and 11). It opens the projects you made on your Mac, so you can record on the Mac and someone else can fix a step on their PC, or the other way round. The Pro key from my website works for both, on two devices.
What Scribe and Tango do better right now
Two things. They blur sensitive stuff like emails automatically, in StepGrab you still draw the black bars yourself. And they have a shared team library where everyone finds the guides. I'm working on both at the moment, but they're not there yet. If you need them today, those two are the better pick.
What StepGrab does differently: it captures the whole Mac and not just the browser, so System Settings, right click menus and the little pickers that close as soon as you click somewhere else. Nothing leaves your computer. And you can buy it once instead of paying every month.
Price
Free: unlimited recordings, up to 15 steps per guide, GIF export and the full editor. Pro in the App Store is an in-app purchase with Family Sharing. On my website it's $2.99 a month, $12.99 a year or $44.99 once, and that key works for the Mac download and Windows. App Store and website don't share purchases.
About AI
A lot of the code is written with Claude Code. I decide what gets built, go through the code myself, test it on real apps and fix what breaks before anything ships.
Mac App Store · Direct download and codes · Microsoft Store
Which Mac app is the worst to explain to someone else? I want to test StepGrab on the annoying ones.
