I have nothing to do with anyone involved in this promotion:

SetApp is a subscription package containing "100+" Mac desktop apps. Here are the apps:

https://setapp.com/apps

One adds or deletes apps as desired. You would want to check the terms to make sure you're getting full-featured apps.

Creatable is offering a promotion for a Setapp subscription for $64.99 -- versus the normal $119.88 ($9.99/month). I haven't found an explanation of whether this is a one-time (i.e., one year) discount, or permanent. I doubt that it is permanent.

Here is the offer

https://creatable.co/market/setapp-annual-pass#

Not bad, $5 less than the https://stacksocial.com/sales/setapp-1-yr-subscription deal that's been going on for the last few weeks....

Thanks for the heads up. I installed SetApp back in the early days, but I immediately uninstalled it, because it embedded itself in my system in a way that I found over-aggressive, such as creating processes that run on startup with no option to tweak that behavior. Anyone know if that has changed?

Setapp runs a daemon to ensure that the applications one runs are licensed, which is no different than what Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and others do. The menubar and dock icons for quick access to Setup's control panel can be disable in its preference pane.

Lucas wrote:

Thanks for the heads up. I installed SetApp back in the early days, but
I immediately uninstalled it, because it embedded itself in my system in
a way that I found over-aggressive, such as creating processes that run
on startup with no option to tweak that behavior. Anyone know if that
has changed?

Yes, as Paul said it just runs a background process to make sure you're registered and possibly to check for app updates. It's pretty innocuous, same as background processes employed by Adobe, Dropbox, BetterTouchTool, 1Password, Audio Hijack, etc

FYI StackSocial has 15% off everything today-only with promo code MEMDAY15, so the final price for one year of SetApp comes out to $58.65.

@Paul and @satis --

Fair enough -- I agree that SetApp's daemon is essentially similar to what Google, Microsoft, and Adobe do, but that doesn't mean it should be accepted as standard practice. I realize that most users may not be bothered, but I think that for any 3rd party process that runs on startup, there should always be some kind of 'disable' option. (Programs like 1Password and BetterTouchTool *do* have such options.)

I'm sure there would be a way to design SetApp so that it could be easily disabled when desired, also disabling access to its associated apps as long as SetApp is disabled.

This is also a security issue: If I recall correctly, SetApp requires administrator privileges during installation, which is how it manages to embed itself in the system. Why should I trust SetApp enough to give it administrator privileges? SetApp is run by MacPaw, which is based in the Ukraine. How can I be confident that they won't be hacked and take advantage of having administrator privileges on my system? Granted, that probably sounds paranoid, but I'm just putting it out there as a thought experiment. No company is perfect and there are always risks, but I'll give administrator privileges to Microsoft before I will give them to MacPaw.

@Lucas, then don't buy Setapp?