Free
Monthly cap on uploads, a maximum video length, and a small Bench watermark in the corner of shared images. Plenty for casual use and a fair way to try the service before paying.
Bench captures, polishes, and shares what's on your screen — one keystroke to a short link. This guide covers every capture mode, every markup tool, every share option, and how Bench Cloud handles the hosting side.
Bench installs as a menubar app and registers a small set of global hotkeys. Press one and the screen dims into a chooser — pick an area, a window, or the whole screen. The shot lands wherever your After screenshot setting points it: a floating preview in the corner, the clipboard, a Save dialog, or straight into the editor.
By default Bench's screenshot hotkeys are ⌘⇧1 and
⌘⇧2 rather than ⌘⇧3 and ⌘⇧4.
That's deliberate — macOS's built-in shortcuts use the lower numbers,
and Bench refuses to fight them out of the box. If you want Bench to
take over ⌘⇧3 / ⌘⇧4 / ⌘⇧5,
Settings → Shortcuts has a one-click button that opens
System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Screenshots
so you can disable them on the macOS side first.
The first capture after install will prompt for Screen Recording permission in System Settings. That's the same permission macOS asks of any screenshot app — Bench can't see your screen until you grant it.
The bread-and-butter mode. Hit ⌘⇧2 and the screen dims
into a crosshair. Click and drag to mark a rectangle — the size
readout follows the pointer in pixels so you can size to a precise
target. Release to capture.
⌘⇧1 grabs the entire display under the pointer. If you've
got two or three monitors plugged in, Bench captures whichever one
the cursor is on at the moment the hotkey fires — no chooser, no
ambiguity. Each display is captured at its native pixel size,
Retina or not.
There's no separate "window mode" hotkey — windows are picked up by the area-selection snapping described above. Start an area capture, move the mouse over the window you want, and Bench highlights it as a unit. Click once and the shot you get is pixel-aligned to that window, shadow included.
Off by default. Flip Include pointer on in Settings → General and the system cursor is composited into the screenshot at the moment you captured. Useful for documenting tooltips, hover states, or "click here" stills; leave it off for clean reference shots.
Bench does Loom-style screen recording too, built directly on
Apple's ScreenCaptureKit. Press ⌘⇧6
to record an area, ⌘⇧7 to record the whole screen.
A pre-record bar slides in from the top of the display where you
pick options before the timer starts.
Area recordings work like area screenshots — drag a rectangle, adjust the corners if you want, then commit. Bench keeps the rectangle visible as a faint dotted border during recording so you always know what's inside the frame. Full-screen recordings skip the rectangle entirely and capture the whole display the pre-record bar is anchored to.
Frame rate is 30 fps by default. Bench will happily push 60 fps for smoother motion if you change it in the pre-record bar, at the cost of larger files. There's no resolution picker — Bench always records at the display's native size and trusts ffmpeg-class H.264 encoding to do the rest.
Two separate switches in the pre-record bar:
SCStream), and Bench feature-gates the toggle if you're on older macOS.Both can be on at once. Bench keeps the two tracks separate internally and mixes them down on export so the levels match.
Turn the camera on in the pre-record bar and a circular picture-in- picture bubble appears with your video feed. Drag it anywhere on screen — Bench remembers the position between recordings — and resize it by dragging its corner. The bubble follows you through both area and full-screen recordings, and renders into the final video at the same pixel size it appeared on screen.
Three small samplers run alongside the screen capture so the editor can overlay walkthrough chrome after the fact:
Once recording starts, a slim control bar docks to the bottom of the screen. From there you can pause, resume, mute or unmute the mic, hide the camera bubble, and stop. Stopping the recording drops you straight into the video editor (or wherever your After recording setting points it).
The 3-2-1 countdown overlay before recording starts is on by default. Turn it off in the pre-record bar's options if you'd rather things start the instant you click record.
Every capture opens — or can open, depending on your settings — in Bench's annotation editor. A glassy floating toolbar runs down the left edge of the window; the inspector on the right exposes stroke colour, thickness, and tool-specific settings. Each tool has a one-letter shortcut so you can roll through them without grabbing the mouse.
Click and drag from start to point. Bench ships five arrow styles:
Hold ⇧ while dragging to lock the arrow to 15° angles
— straight horizontals, verticals, and diagonals snap cleanly.
The three shape tools — Rectangle (R),
Oval (O), and Highlight
(H) — all work the same way. Drag a region; the
inspector lets you flip between outline and filled, change stroke
thickness, and pick a colour. Highlight is always semi-transparent
and sits on top of the image, marker-style.
Click anywhere to drop a text caret. Type. The inspector exposes font size, weight, and colour. Bench renders text against the capture using the same Core Graphics text pipeline Preview uses, so it reads crisp at every export size.
A freehand stroke tool. Useful for circling something messy, or writing a quick "this" in the margin. Strokes are smoothed automatically as you draw so you don't get jagged Bezier artefacts, and they respect the current colour + thickness from the inspector.
Bench's redact tool is destructive in the right way: drop a rectangle and the pixels inside it are replaced before export, so a redaction in a shared link cannot be reversed by inspecting the file. Two styles:
Use pixelate when you're hiding personal data — names, emails, account numbers. The pattern is visibly a redaction, which is what you want.
Activates a corner-handle overlay over the capture. Drag any corner or edge to trim. The crop is non-destructive while the capture is in Bench's library — flipping back to the Select tool and re-cropping will expand back out to the original bounds. Export collapses it to actual pixels.
Standard ⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z. Every annotation,
crop, and redaction is a separate undo step. The history is
per-capture and persists between editor sessions — close a
capture, open it tomorrow, and you can still walk back changes
you made today.
Bench manages its own internal storage rather than dumping files
to ~/Desktop or ~/Downloads like macOS's
built-in screenshot tool. Every capture you take lands here:
~/Library/Application Support/com.generalsoftwarecorp.bench/captures/
One folder per capture, keyed by UUID, containing the original bitmap, a JSON sidecar with edit state (arrows, crops, redactions), and — for videos — the encoded MP4 plus optional click/cursor/keystroke tracks.
The library popover (⌘⇧L) is your window into this
folder. Captures only leave the app when you explicitly Save…,
drag them out, copy them to the clipboard, or share to Bench
Cloud. There's no silent file copy on capture — the old "Save
folder" preference was removed because every export route now
goes through the explicit save panel or drag.
Settings → General → Local History controls how long captures stick around. The slider runs through eight named steps: 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month (the default), 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and Forever. Anything older than that is pruned the next time Bench launches.
Forever is genuinely forever — but Bench enforces a 1,000-capture hard cap as a safety net, so a "Forever" setting that grows unbounded over years still won't fill your disk. You'll see a gentle warning under the slider when you pick Forever, with the exact cap number.
Bench Cloud is the companion service that turns "I just took a screenshot" into "here's the link". It's optional — Bench works perfectly fine without it, and you can use every other share path described above. But once you've connected it, sharing is one keystroke.
A small hosted service at bench.cloud with a paired short-link domain at bnch.sh. The app uploads your capture there, stores it in object storage, and hands back a short URL anyone can open in a browser. There's a web dashboard at bench.cloud for viewing everything you've shared, renaming captures, and deleting links.
What gets stored, exactly:
What is not stored: any of the click / keystroke / cursor sidecars from a recording (those stay local to your Mac), the original full-resolution bytes if downscaling kicked in, any metadata about the app or window you captured, or any account credentials beyond the session token Bench Cloud issued itself.
Every shared capture gets a short URL of the form
https://bnch.sh/code, where code is a
short randomly-generated identifier — readable, copy-paste-able,
hard to guess. Opening the link shows the capture on a clean
viewer page; no sign-in required for the viewer, no chrome
around the image.
Bench Cloud captures are unlisted: there's no directory, no public search, no SEO. The only way to find a capture is to know its short code. The codes are long enough that guessing one is impractical, but they are not encrypted — treat a Bench Cloud link the same way you'd treat any unlisted Google Doc or YouTube link. Don't put one anywhere you wouldn't want a determined reader to follow.
Free-tier captures carry a small Bench watermark in the corner, stamped server-side. Pro removes it.
Bench transmits captures over HTTPS to Vercel-hosted edge
functions and stores them in Cloudflare R2 object storage,
served back through a Bench-controlled CDN domain
(cdn.bench.cloud). The web app is plain Next.js
with cookie sessions for the dashboard; the Mac app uses a
Bearer token kept in the macOS Keychain.
Signing in is email-based, no password. From the Bench Cloud
window inside the app, click Sign in and Bench
opens your default browser to the Bench Cloud login page. Enter
your email, paste the six-digit code from your inbox, and the
browser hands the app a token over a custom
benchcloud:// URL. The token is stored in your
Keychain — sign out from Settings → Bench Cloud and it's
deleted.
First-time signups get a complimentary trial period (the default is seven days) before billing kicks in. After that you're on the Free tier unless you upgrade — Free still works, with the limits described below.
Open the Bench Cloud window inside the app (menubar → Bench Cloud, or Settings → Bench Cloud → Open Bench Cloud) or the dashboard at bench.cloud, find the capture, click Delete. The image is removed from R2 and the short link starts returning a 404 within seconds.
Deletion is permanent — there's no trash, no recovery. Bench doesn't keep secondary copies anywhere else once you've asked it to delete. The local copy on your Mac is untouched; only the hosted copy goes away.
Edited a capture you already shared? Bench is smart about it.
The next time you hit Share on the same capture, Bench detects
that the pixels have changed and replaces the
object behind the existing short link — same
bnch.sh/code URL, new content. Anyone with
the link sees the new bytes without you having to re-send it.
If the pixels haven't changed since the last upload, Bench skips the network round trip entirely and just re-copies the cached URL to your clipboard. The toast reads "Copied link" instead of "Uploaded" so you can tell which path ran.
Bench Cloud has two tiers:
Monthly cap on uploads, a maximum video length, and a small Bench watermark in the corner of shared images. Plenty for casual use and a fair way to try the service before paying.
Unlimited uploads, no video length cap, no watermark, and a larger storage quota. Annual billing; the exact price is on the dashboard.
When you hit a Free-tier limit (monthly upload count, video length, or storage), Bench surfaces an upsell modal with the specific reason and a one-click path to upgrade. Until you do, Share is disabled with a tooltip explaining why — no silent failures.
Bench the app and Bench Cloud the service are billed separately. The $59.99 one-time licence covers the Mac app forever; Bench Cloud is a subscription you can take or leave. Buy the app, use every share path except short links, and you'll never see a Bench Cloud bill.
Global shortcuts work whether or not Bench is the front app — that's the whole point of a screenshot tool. Editor shortcuts only fire when an editor window is focused. Every global shortcut is remappable in Settings → Shortcuts; the editor letter shortcuts are fixed.
Bench's defaults are ⌘⇧1 / ⌘⇧2 rather than ⌘⇧3 / ⌘⇧4 so they don't collide with macOS's built-in screenshot shortcuts. If you want to take those keys over, Settings → Shortcuts has a one-click button that opens the right pane in System Settings.
Open Settings from the menubar icon or with ⌘,.
Eight tabs in a sidebar, grouped into three sections: capture
behaviour (General, Shortcuts, Appearance, Preview), account
and updates (Updates, License, Bench Cloud), and the About tab.
The catch-all tab. Four groups:
SMAppService API so it appears in System Settings → General → Login Items.Bench Capture {date} at {time} by default; {date}, {time}, and {n} placeholders supported) and the screenshot format (PNG / JPEG / HEIC, PNG default).One row per global shortcut. Click the key chip to record a new combination; the toggle on the left enables or disables that shortcut entirely. Below the list is a callout with the three-step instructions for replacing macOS's built-in screenshot shortcuts and an Open Keyboard Shortcuts button that jumps straight to the right pane.
Three radio options — System (default), Light, or Dark. Affects every Bench window, the editor chrome, and the menubar popover. System follows whatever macOS is set to; the explicit choices override macOS for Bench specifically.
The floating preview tab. Three controls:
Sparkle-style auto-updater. Tells you the current version, lets you check for updates manually, and toggles automatic background checks. New builds are signed and notarised so Gatekeeper accepts them without complaint.
State-aware. Four modes:
A summary card showing your sign-in status, plan, and storage use, plus a big Open Bench Cloud button that pops the full Bench Cloud window. The substantive UI lives in that standalone window so it can stay open alongside whatever else you're doing; the settings tab is the breadcrumb that makes it discoverable.
Version number, credits, support email, and a couple of links to the website and changelog. Nothing dynamic.
Bench gives you a 14-day free trial with every feature unlocked — full screenshots, full recording, every annotation tool, every share path. No watermark on captures while you're trialing. The trial starts the first time you launch the app.
Once the trial expires, capture and edit keep working on the captures already in your library, but new captures are blocked until you activate a licence. Buying is a one-time $59.99. That covers the Mac app forever, every future version, on every Mac you sign in on.
Buy a Bench licence, paste the key into Settings → License → Activate, and you're done. Lost the key? It's in the receipt email from your purchase, and Settings → License → Manage license opens a self-service page where you can re-send it.
The $59.99 licence is for the Mac app. Bench Cloud — the optional hosting service that powers short links — is billed separately. You can use Bench forever without ever subscribing to Bench Cloud; the link-share path is just disabled.
Bench has the biggest one-time price in the lineup, so if you've had your eye on more than one of our apps it's worth pricing out Unlimited against a standalone Bench licence. Unlimited bundles every General Software Mac app — Bench included — for a single subscription, and it folds in a generous monthly Bench Cloud allowance: more uploads per month, longer video captures, no watermark on Free, and the short-link share path turned on from day one. If you use Bench at work and were planning to subscribe to Bench Cloud anyway, Unlimited usually wins on price the moment you add a second app from the list.
The full breakdown — every app and every Bench Cloud allowance — lives on the Unlimited page.
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