Site shortcuts in the Dock: what the free tier covers

Pricing pages for this category answer a question most readers have not reached yet. Putting a site in the Dock is already free twice over, once through macOS and once through Chrome, so the real question is not what these tools cost but what makes a free route stop being enough. Answering that in the wrong order produces a purchase that solves nothing, or months of friction that a small one time payment would have removed. What follows separates the free ground from the paid ground, and puts numbers on both.

What costs nothing before any purchase

Two routes ship with software already installed, and between them they cover a large share of what people want.

Safari can turn an open page into an app. Apple documents the requirement as macOS Sonoma 14 or later, and the result is saved to the Applications folder inside the home folder, from where it opens through the Dock or Spotlight. It gets its own window, its own icon, and a small settings panel with fields for the name, the address, and the icon.

Chrome offers the same outcome through Install page as app. That item carries the windowed behaviour that used to sit behind a checkbox before Chrome 128 split the old menu entry in two during 2024. Chrome's version requires no particular macOS release beyond what Chrome itself supports.

The third free option is dragging a URL onto the right hand side of the Dock. It produces a launcher rather than an app, and clicking it opens the default browser in a tab. For someone who only wanted the site one click away, that is the whole job done in two seconds.

None of these three asks for an account, a licence, or a card. Any evaluation of a paid product starts from here, because this is the baseline the paid product has to beat.

Where the free routes run out

The limits are specific rather than general, which makes them easy to test against an actual situation.

The Safari route has a version floor. A Mac held at Ventura does not have the menu item at all, and no setting brings it back. On a managed fleet deliberately kept a release behind, this is not a preference but a schedule.

The Chrome route ties the result to a Chrome profile. That is helpful for keeping an app aligned with the browser profile holding the credentials, and it becomes awkward when a single machine needs several sites separated in ways that do not follow the profile structure.

Both browser routes also stop at the browser boundary. Building five apps means repeating the same manual steps five times, with a name and an icon chosen by hand each time, and nothing that records what was built or rebuilds it on a new Mac. For two apps that is trivial. For fifteen, spread across two machines, it becomes a maintenance job that nobody scheduled.

The last limit is presentation. Icons come from whatever the site publishes, which often means a small image scaled up. Replacing them is possible in the Safari panel and tedious across a large set.

Two different things get called free

Paid products in this category use the word free in two ways, and the difference decides whether a free route is usable permanently or only for evaluation.

The first shape is a capped free plan. WebCatalog publishes a free tier that includes 2 desktop apps, 2 profiles, and 1 space, with cloud sync included. That is a genuine standing allowance rather than a countdown, and for someone whose shortlist is two sites it may never expire into a bill.

The second shape is a trial. Coherence X offers a free trial download, and Unite Pro advertises the ability to create a first app for free before buying. Both are evaluation mechanisms. They answer the question of whether the tool works with a specific site, which is exactly the check worth running before money is involved, and neither is designed as a permanent tier.

The practical move is to use the second shape to test the awkward site rather than the easy one. A site with external sign in or a heavy dependence on browser extensions tells more in ten minutes than three straightforward sites tell in a week.

The numbers, side by side

Published prices at the time of writing, for the routes most often compared.

Route	Price	Model	Stated limits
Safari built app	Included with macOS	None	Requires macOS Sonoma 14 or later
Chrome install page as app	Included with Chrome	None	Tied to a Chrome profile
WebCatalog Basic	Free	Standing free plan	2 desktop apps, 2 profiles, 1 space
WebCatalog Pro	5 USD per user per month, billed annually	Subscription	Unlimited apps, profiles, and spaces
WebCatalog Business	8 USD per user per month, billed annually	Subscription	Adds shared spaces and SSO
Coherence X6, 1 Mac	39.99 USD	One time, optional paid major upgrades	Unlimited apps, 1 Mac
Coherence X6, 3 Macs	59.99 USD	One time, optional paid major upgrades	Unlimited apps, 3 Macs
Unite Pro, 1 Mac	39.99 USD	One time, optional paid major upgrades	Unlimited apps, requires macOS 15 or later

Two details inside that table matter more than the headline figures. Coherence X and Unite Pro both state unlimited app creation, so the number of sites promoted does not change the price. WebCatalog's free tier caps apps at 2, which makes the cap, rather than any feature, the thing that decides whether a bill ever arrives.

Discounts exist on the one time side. Both BZG products list a 20 percent student discount, and upgrade pricing for existing customers is advertised at up to 25 percent off. Unite Pro is also available through the Setapp subscription with a 7 day free trial, quoted on the vendor page at 9.99 USD per month and on Setapp's own pricing page at 14.99 USD for the Mac plan, which bundles many other applications and is only worth considering by someone who wants the rest of that bundle.

One time and monthly, measured over three years

Comparing 39.99 USD against 5 USD per month is meaningless until both are put on the same timeline.

A WebCatalog Pro seat at 5 USD per user per month billed annually comes to 60 USD per year, or 180 USD across three years for one person. A one time purchase at 39.99 USD stays at 39.99 USD across the same period, with the caveat that the licence covers major versions and future major upgrades are described as optional and paid. Even allowing for one paid upgrade inside three years, the gap stays wide.

The comparison reverses in two situations. The first is a team: per seat subscription pricing scales with headcount, and so does a per Mac licence, so the arithmetic has to be redone with real numbers rather than assumed. The 3 Mac licence at 59.99 USD works out to roughly 20 USD per machine, which changes the shape of the comparison for anyone with a laptop and a desktop.

The second is the feature set. Shared spaces, centralised billing, activity logs, and single sign on appear on the Business tier at 8 USD per user per month, and those are organisational requirements rather than personal ones. Nobody buys an activity log by accident, and nobody needs one to keep a chat client out of the tab strip.

What actually triggers payment

Working backwards from the free routes, four things push a situation past them.

The first is quantity. Two or three apps are comfortable to build by hand and to rebuild after a machine change. Somewhere above five, repeating manual steps starts to cost more than the software does.

The second is the macOS floor. A Mac that cannot run Sonoma has no Safari route, and a purchased tool with its own requirements may not help either, since Unite Pro states macOS 15 or later. Checking the floor before checking the price avoids buying something the machine cannot run.

The third is separation. Running the same service under several accounts is possible through the free routes, through separate Safari apps or separate Chrome profiles, and it becomes fiddly to maintain as the count grows.

The fourth is consistency. Matching icons, predictable naming, and the ability to hand the same setup to a second machine are the kind of thing that is invisible until a laptop is replaced. That is the point where an unrecorded set of hand built apps turns into an afternoon of rebuilding. What a purchased tool carries in that area is set out under Features, and the shape of each price model under Pricing.

Five questions to ask a pricing page

Pricing pages in this category are short, which makes it easy to read the headline number and miss the terms that actually decide the cost. Five questions cover almost all of it, and every one of them is answerable before anything is downloaded.

How far back does macOS support go. This eliminates products rather than ranking them, so it belongs first. Unite Pro states macOS 15 or later, and a machine below that line is out regardless of price.

How many Macs does one licence cover. The BZG listings price 1 Mac at 39.99 USD, 3 Macs at 59.99 USD, and 5 Macs at 99.99 USD, which means a laptop and a desktop cost less per machine than a single machine does. Anyone with two Macs who buys the single licence pays twice for something the larger licence would have covered.

Is there a cap on how many apps can exist. Both BZG products state unlimited app creation, while WebCatalog's free tier caps desktop apps at 2. A cap is the most common reason a free plan converts into a paid one, so it is worth finding before starting rather than after building the third app.

Is the price paid once or repeatedly, and what happens at the next major version. Both BZG products describe the model as buy once with optional paid major upgrades, which is a third category sitting between a perpetual licence and a subscription. The cost over three years depends on how that option is exercised.

Does a trial exist, and does it cover the specific site that matters. A trial that builds one app is enough to answer this, provided the app built is the difficult one.

What to change first

Build one app through the free route the Mac already supports, and use it for a week before reading another pricing page. If it holds, the free tier was the answer. If it fails on a specific site, use a trial on that same site, since the awkward case is the only one that produces a real verdict. Kagemusha shows the kinds of services people commonly pull out of the tab strip, which is a faster way to judge fit than a feature list.