Rambox on a Mac after the paid plan changes

Rambox has been on Macs long enough that a fair number of installs predate the version currently on the download page. That is where most of the confusion starts. The product that answers to the name today is not the one that once sat on GitHub under an open source licence, the free tier is not the free tier people remember, and the feature that most Mac users came for now sits on the paid side of the line.

Anyone typing "rambox mac" into a search box is usually asking one of two questions. Does it still do the job without paying, or is the thing it stopped doing worth seven dollars a month. Both questions have clear answers, but only after the plan boundary is drawn correctly, because almost every complaint about Rambox on macOS turns out to be a description of the free tier rather than a description of the app.

The product changed twice, and both changes still matter

Rambox started as an open source Electron app. Version 0.7.x was the last of that line, community recipes were public, and the whole thing was free in the way that word is usually meant. The rewrite that followed was a different product with the same name: closed source, account based, and split into a free Basic tier and a paid Pro tier.

The second change was quieter and more consequential. Features that had been ordinary parts of the app moved into the paid tier as the commercial version matured. Workspaces went to Pro. Session and multi login went to Pro. Extensions went to Pro. Nothing was removed from the machine of anyone already running an old build, which is exactly why the internet still carries confident advice describing a version of Rambox that a new download will not match.

The open source energy in this category did not vanish, it moved. Franz was forked into Ferdi, and Ferdi was hard forked into Ferdium, which is where the free and unrestricted branch of this idea now lives. That lineage matters when reading old forum threads, because a recommendation to use Rambox written in 2019 and a recommendation written last year are recommending two different things.

Check the version before trusting any guide. An install carried across three Macs by Migration Assistant can still be running the old line, and its behaviour will not match anything on the current site.

What the free plan gives you on a Mac

The Basic plan costs nothing, has no time limit, and is more generous than its reputation in one specific way: there is no cap on how many apps go into the sidebar. Gmail, Slack, Notion, Linear, an internal dashboard, all of them can sit in the rail without payment.

What Basic includes:

• Unlimited apps in the sidebar
• Up to two instances per app
• Notifications
• Focus mode
• Hibernation for apps that are not in the foreground

New accounts get a thirty day Pro trial with no card required, and the account drops to Basic when the trial ends rather than locking the app.

The word doing the heavy lifting is instance. An instance is a second copy of the same service in the sidebar, and Basic allows two of them. What Basic does not include is the thing that makes a second copy useful. Session and multi login is a Pro feature, so two instances of Gmail on the free plan are two windows onto the same signed in account, not two accounts side by side.

That single line explains most of the frustration in reviews. Someone installs Rambox specifically to keep a work Google account and a personal Google account open at once, adds Gmail twice, and finds the same inbox twice. The app is behaving as documented. The documentation is just further away than the download button.

What sits behind Pro

Pro is seven dollars a month, or seventy dollars a year, which works out to two months free against the monthly rate. A team plan exists at fourteen dollars per user per month with a five user minimum, adding SAML and Active Directory, centralised billing, preinstalled apps, and custom branding.

Pro adds:

• Workspaces, meaning named groups of apps that can be switched as a set
• Session and multi login, meaning genuinely separate logins for the same service
• Unlimited instances per app
• Unlimited custom apps beyond the catalogue
• Extensions
• Premium support

For a single account per service and a tidy sidebar, Basic is genuinely enough and the annual cost is zero. For two Gmails, two Slacks, and a client account that has to stay signed in, Pro is not an upsell, it is the product. There is no configuration trick that produces separate sessions on Basic, and time spent looking for one is time lost.

Setting it up on a Mac without surprises

Installation is an ordinary macOS drag to Applications, followed by a sign in, because an account is required before the app is usable. From there, four settings are worth handling on day one rather than a month later.

Notification permission

Rambox relays every service's alerts through one macOS notification stream, so if the system permission is off, everything goes quiet at once and the app looks broken. It lives in System Settings, Notifications, in the application list. Turning on alerts there and then deciding per app inside Rambox gives a clean split between what macOS is allowed to show and what each service is allowed to send.

Hibernation

Hibernation frees memory by unloading services that have been idle. It is the main lever against Electron memory use, and it has a cost: a hibernated service is not connected, so its notifications arrive when it wakes rather than when they happen. Chat apps that need to be instant should be excluded from hibernation. Dashboards and project tools rarely need the exclusion.

The custom app limit

Any web app can be added by URL, but the number of custom apps outside the catalogue is capped on Basic and uncapped on Pro. Internal tools are usually custom apps, so a setup that leans on self hosted dashboards will hit that boundary sooner than a setup made of well known services.

Default browser behaviour

Links arriving from Mail, Slack, or Calendar open in the macOS default browser, not inside Rambox. This is not a setting anyone got wrong. macOS holds one default browser and cannot route a link to a particular app or a particular signed in account. Any tool in this category inherits the same limit, and it is worth knowing before blaming the app for it.

The order apps are added

The sidebar keeps the order things were added unless it is rearranged, and that order tends to fossilise. Putting the two or three services that account for most of the day at the top, and pushing everything checked once a week to the bottom, is a two minute job that pays for itself. On Basic, where a workspace cannot be used to hide the rest, ordering is the only organisation available.

Where the friction actually shows up

Three patterns account for most of the day to day cost, and none of them are bugs.

The first is that everything lives in one window. A sidebar of twenty services replaces a tab bar of forty tabs, which is a real improvement in density and no improvement at all in switching. Command Tab still lands on the app, not on the service, and finding the right service is still a scan down a list.

The second is link routing. Every link that arrives from outside opens in the default browser under whatever account happened to be signed in there. For anyone whose work arrives as links in chat, that is a handful of copy, switch, paste cycles every day, each one costing a few seconds of attention rather than a few seconds of clock.

The third is identity in notifications. A notification says which service fired it. It does not say which account, which matters exactly when two accounts of the same service are in play, and only Pro puts two accounts in play at all.

A fourth pattern shows up later, usually after the first Mac is replaced. Settings and the service list sync through the vendor's cloud, tied to the account created at install. That makes moving to a new machine easy and makes the setup dependent on a service staying available, which is a different trade than the one made by tools that sync through storage the user already owns. It is worth deciding consciously rather than discovering it during a migration.

None of these are reasons to avoid Rambox. They are the reasons the category exists, and the differences between the products in it are mostly differences in how they answer these three questions.

How the free options line up

Prices below come from each vendor's own pricing page and were correct in September 2026. Vendors change terms, so treat the shape as stable and the numbers as a snapshot. A fuller side by side view is kept on Compared with Rambox, and the same treatment for the rest of the category is at Compared with Ferdium.

Option	Cost	Account to start	Two logins of one service	Workspaces	Own CSS or JS
Rambox Basic	Free	Required	No	No	No
Rambox Pro	$7 per month, $70 per year	Required	Yes	Yes	Yes
Ferdium	Free, Apache 2.0	Not required	Yes	Yes	Yes
Chrome profiles	Free	Optional	Yes	Not applicable	No
Safari profiles	Free, Sonoma and later	Not required	Yes	Not applicable	No

Read the table by the column that matches the actual problem. If the problem is a cluttered browser and one account per service, the free options all solve it and paying solves nothing extra. If the problem is two accounts of the same service, the free column narrows to Ferdium and browser profiles. If the problem is switching speed rather than isolation, none of these rows help, because all of them either put everything in one window or spread everything across windows that macOS treats as identical.

Choosing by switch count, not by feature list

Counting switches per day predicts the right answer better than counting features. Under roughly ten switches, Basic or a second browser profile is sufficient and anything else is overhead. Between ten and forty, the sidebar model earns its place, and the question becomes whether duplicate accounts force the Pro line. Above forty, the bottleneck is the act of switching itself, and no plan tier addresses that, because a list is still a list.

Also count duplicate accounts honestly. One Gmail, one Slack, one Notion is a different situation from three Gmails and two Slacks, and only the second situation makes seventy dollars a year an obvious call. The middle case, one duplicate account and a lot of custom internal tools, is the one where the free tier quietly stops fitting without any single moment of failure.

What to change first

Install the current build, use Basic for a week without adding a second copy of anything, and note every moment that required leaving the app. If those moments are mostly link routing and window switching rather than logins, Pro will not fix them and neither will a different sidebar. That is the point to compare the pricing of a per app approach such as SpaceDeck against the annual cost of a plan that solves a problem that was never the one in the way.