Custom icons for shortcuts: what the free tier covers

Search for the cost of putting a website in the Dock and two answers come back at once: zero, and about forty dollars. Both are accurate. The features already installed on a Mac cover the job with no payment involved, and the point where they stop is specific enough to check against your own situation in a couple of minutes. Knowing where the line sits is the whole decision.

The built-in routes carry no price at all

macOS has shipped the ability to save a page as a standalone app since Sonoma 14. Open the page in Safari, choose File then Add to Dock, name it, and it is saved to the Applications folder inside the home folder. There is no purchase step and no app limit.

Finder aliases are free in the same way, as is replacing an icon through the info window. Chrome's Install page as app costs nothing either, and imposes no cap on how many apps are installed. For one or two sites in the Dock, the pricing question never arises.

One capability is frequently assumed to be paid when it is not. Apple states that a Safari web app shares no browsing history, cookies, website data, or settings with Safari. Separation from the browser is included at no cost. What the built-in route does not promise is several separate sessions of the same site at once, and that is the actual boundary where money starts to matter.

Free tiers stop at app counts or at session counts

Every tool in this category can be started for free. What differs is where free stops. Figures below are from each vendor's published pages as of September 2026.

Tool	Free tier	Paid
Safari, Add to Dock	Unlimited apps, isolated from Safari	None
Chrome, Install page as app	Unlimited apps	None
Coherence X	First app free, 7-day trial	From 39.99 USD, one-time
Unite	First app free	From 39.99 USD, one-time
WebCatalog	2 desktop apps, 2 profiles, 1 space	Pro at 770 JPY per user per month, billed annually
Rambox	Unlimited apps, 2 instances per app, 2 custom apps	Pro at 7 USD per month, or 70 USD per year

Two shapes of limit appear here. One caps how many apps exist. The other allows unlimited apps but caps how many simultaneous logins each one can hold. WebCatalog's free Basic tier is the first shape: two desktop apps, two profiles, one space. Rambox's free Basic tier is the second: unlimited installed apps, but two instances per app and two custom web apps.

The distinction decides which free tier fits. Three different services on one account each fit comfortably inside a count-based free tier. One service used from four accounts does not fit inside a session-based one, no matter how generous the app count looks. Work out which of the two problems you actually have before comparing any prices.

One-time and subscription diverge at year three

Putting a one-time purchase and a monthly fee side by side in the same table is where most comparisons go wrong. They have to be multiplied out over the period the tool will realistically be used.

The one-time side is simple arithmetic. Pay 39.99 USD once and the version purchased keeps working. Nothing recurs. The next decision arrives when a new major version ships, and it is a decision, not an automatic charge.

The subscription side compounds. WebCatalog Pro at 770 JPY per month billed annually is 9,240 JPY a year and 27,720 JPY over three. Rambox Pro at 70 USD a year is 210 USD over three. Against a single 39.99 USD payment, the gap by year three runs to several times the one-time price.

Which is cheaper depends entirely on how long the tool stays installed. For a three-month project, a subscription is the smaller number and the right answer. For something that organises how a Mac is used every morning, the honest planning horizon is years, and the multiplied figure is the one to compare.

Currency is the other moving part. Most tools in this category price in US dollars, and any local-currency figure is a conversion at some rate on some date. WebCatalog's pricing page states outright that prices are converted from USD at the current exchange rate. A price that looks different from the one quoted in an article from six months ago may reflect the exchange rate rather than a change by the vendor. Compare the dollar figure and note the date alongside it.

Check four facts that are not the price

A price table alone can be current and still misleading. Four things are worth confirming on the vendor's own pages before paying:

• Whether the product is still being developed. Download pages outlive development by a long margin.
• Whether new sign-ups are still open. Existing-customers-only is a real state.
• Whether ownership has changed. Bartender, a Mac menu bar utility, changed hands in 2024, and the transfer was publicly discussed at the time. Price stayed the same while the questions people asked about it did not.
• Whether a pricing change has been announced. Moves from one-time to subscription are announced ahead of the switch.

The terms of a one-time purchase deserve the same check. Perpetual usually means perpetual for a version range, most often the current major version, with the next major release sold separately or at an upgrade price. Free entry points differ too: a time-limited trial expires on a date regardless of whether it was evaluated, while a count-limited free tier has no clock on it and can be used properly over several weeks.

Three questions decide whether to pay anything

How many sites need an icon? Three or fewer fits inside almost every free tier, and the built-in routes have no cap at all.

Is the same service used from more than one account at the same time? If so, the requirement is separate sessions, not more apps, and a free tier that advertises unlimited apps may still cap instances at two.

Do browser extensions need to keep working inside the window? An ad filter, a password manager, or a translator used daily will not run in a Safari web app, because that route handles Safari extensions and not Chrome Web Store ones.

Three noes means there is nothing to buy. Build it with what is already installed. Only a yes on the second or third question turns this into a purchasing decision.

Costs that never appear on an invoice

Two expenses sit outside the price table and are large enough to change the comparison.

The first is rebuild time. Browsers update every few weeks, and apps that wrap a browser binary can lose their icon or stop launching when that happens. Ten apps at five minutes each is close to an hour, repeated several times a year. Whether that repair is automatic or manual is worth as much weight as a one-time price difference.

The second is device count. One-time licences are frequently per machine, so a work Mac and a home Mac means two purchases against a listed price that looks like one. Subscriptions are usually priced per user rather than per device, which can make them cheaper for one person running two machines. Compare on your own configuration, not on the headline figure.

Evaluation mechanics matter in practice as well. A seven-day or fourteen-day trial that lands on a busy week expires unevaluated. A count-based free tier lets a tool sit on the machine for a month under real conditions before any payment, which produces a better decision.

Team pricing is a different table entirely

Rolling this out to a group changes the arithmetic, because the per-seat plans sit well above the individual ones and often carry a floor on seat count.

Rambox lists a Teams plan at 14 USD per user per month, starting at five users, which adds team management, centralised billing, SAML and Active Directory support, preinstalled apps, and custom branding on top of Pro. WebCatalog lists a Business tier at 1,232 JPY per user per month billed annually, adding shared spaces, team management, centralised billing, an activity log, and single sign-on. Both figures are from their published pricing pages as of September 2026.

Run the multiplication before treating this as a team purchase. Five seats at 14 USD per month is 840 USD a year, which is more than twenty times a single one-time licence. That gap is not unreasonable, since the team tiers are selling identity integration and central billing rather than the ability to make an icon. The question is whether those administrative features are actually needed, or whether each person separately using a free tier or a one-time licence covers the real requirement.

For a small group where everyone simply wants their own daily sites out of the browser, individual licences usually win by a wide margin. Central provisioning becomes worth paying for at the point where someone has to answer for which staff have access to which internal systems, and where offboarding needs to be a single action rather than a request sent to each person.

Match the tier to how you actually work

Three usage patterns cover most readers. A single screen opened every morning, such as an internal timesheet or a job queue, is fully served by the built-in routes at no cost. A working set of five to eight services exceeds count-capped free tiers, and the deciding factor becomes whether extensions are required. The same service across several accounts is a session-count problem, where a free tier offering unlimited apps still runs out at two instances.

Deciding which pattern applies tells you which row of the pricing table to read. Skipping that step leads to comparing top-tier plans nobody needs and concluding that everything is expensive.

Read the free tier next to the feature list rather than on its own, since it matters whether the paid step unlocks capability or only raises a limit. If only the limit changes, the free tier can be evaluated under real conditions. Scope is set out under Features, the free allowance and the one-time price sit at Pricing alongside a three-year comparison against other tools, and Supported services shows whether the site you have in mind is already covered as a preset. What a one-time purchase includes, and what happens to data when an app is deleted, are answered in the FAQ.

What to change first

Count the sites, then count the accounts per site. If both numbers are small and no browser extension is involved, build them with the built-in Safari route today and spend nothing. If either number is larger, evaluate a per-app profile tool inside its free tier before paying, and compare the three-year total rather than the sticker price when you do. Kagemusha publishes that comparison directly.