Atua

Atua is a native macOS app that puts a context-aware AI assistant one hotkey away. Hit Option-Space from any app and it picks up your selected text, clipboard, a screenshot, OCR'd window content, or voice input, then runs a model of your choice against it. The killer feature is the system tool integration: Atua can drive Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Finder, Shortcuts, the shell, and HTTP, plus MCP servers for GitHub, Postgres, Slack, and Filesystem, so prompts can actually do work rather than just return text.

It's bring-your-own-key across 15+ providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Mistral, DeepSeek, and others), which makes it appealing for people who already pay for API credits and don't want yet another subscription. Pricing is a one-time $29 with lifetime updates and a 7-day money-back guarantee. There's no account, no telemetry, and everything except the outbound model calls stays on-device. It's macOS-only and there's no free trial, just the refund window.

If you live in Raycast / Alfred / Shortcuts territory and want a Cmd-K layer that can both reason and take action across your local apps, Atua is a credible alternative to Raycast AI or MacGPT, especially because you pick the model and pay per token rather than per seat.