A complete macOS app boilerplate: licensing, payments, Sparkle updates, onboarding, permissions, AI, a landing site and a notarized release, built and tested. You bring the idea; your AI coding agent does the rest.
Get ShipCat for $49
How it works
Clone a finished app, tell your coding agent what it should do, and ship. Progress lives in SHIP.md, so you can stop and continue another day.
Clone the private repository and open the folder in the tool you code with: Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code with Copilot, Codex or Xcode's coding assistant.
The agent reads AGENTS.md, asks about your idea and shapes it with you: which surface, which permissions, how you sell it. It asks before anything that costs money or cannot be undone.
Thirteen phases from the first question to a signed, notarized 1.0.0 on your own site, with updates, licensing and a checkout that already work.
Works with
One AGENTS.md is the canonical instruction file; CLAUDE.md, Cursor rules and Copilot instructions point to it. A skill with twenty references covers every phase.
Three surfaces
A window, a menu bar panel and a notch panel are built and tested. Keep one, two or all three; the agent removes the rest.
A glass window with a sidebar and a standard menu. Liquid Glass on macOS 26, the usual material before it.
A panel under a status item, opened by a click or a global shortcut. Launch at login, Settings and Quit are already in the menu.
A panel that grows out of the notch when you hover. On Macs without a notch it becomes a pill at the top of the screen.
What is inside
Every part a paid Mac app needs, except the part that is yours. Plain Swift, SwiftUI and AppKit, with Sparkle as the one dependency.
License keys with seats, a trial or a free tier, offline grace, and one-click activation from the thank-you page.
Polar or Creem out of the box, a recipe for Paddle and others. Checkout on your site, the key in the buyer's inbox.
Sparkle with signed updates, an appcast your site serves, and a What's New window after each one.
Onboarding with permission steps, Settings, a global shortcut and launch at login. The parts people judge an app by.
Eleven macOS permissions, from Accessibility to Screen Recording: checked, requested and explained to the user.
Through your site with your key, with the user's own key, or both. Streaming, and only for licensed users.
A feedback window that emails you, with the app version and the Mac's details attached.
Landing page, What's New, privacy, terms, a download that always serves the latest release, and the small API the app needs.
A setup script that finds your Developer ID certificate and stores your notary credentials, and a doctor that says what is missing first.
A doctor for your Mac, an app icon in every size and a social card, signing setup, release, and a reset to the first run.
For the app, the site and the scripts. The release script is rehearsed against fake Apple tools, so the first real one is not a surprise.
AGENTS.md, a skill with twenty references covering every phase, and SHIP.md for progress. Written for agents, readable by people.
scripts/release.sh 1.0.0 does the whole thing, and writes nothing to your config until every step succeeded. Before the first one, scripts/doctor.sh --release says what your Mac still lacks.
Pricing
No subscription. The invitation to the private repository arrives right after checkout.
From Voprex Labs
ShipCat is the code behind our own Mac apps, with the app-specific parts taken out and the rest tested.
A fast, private clipboard manager. Copy everything, choose when you paste.
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Downloads that clean up after themselves, picked right from the notch.
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See what's eating your disk. Clean only what's safe.
Coming soonFAQ
Access to a private GitHub repository with the full source of ShipCat: the Xcode project, the site, the scripts, the tests and the instructions for your coding agent. You clone it, and your agent starts from there. Every new version lands in the same repository as a GitHub Release.
To run the app on your own Mac, no. To give it to anyone else, yes: shipping a Mac app for download needs a Developer ID certificate, and the Apple Developer Program costs 99 USD a year. If you do not have an account, or you want to publish on the Mac App Store, Voprex's specialists can help: write to support@shipcat.app with the email address you bought with and your app's name. Your agent can draft that email for you.
Any agent that reads an AGENTS.md file: Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code with Copilot, Codex, Xcode's coding assistant and others. The whole path to a release was rehearsed end to end with Claude Code. If your tool does not pick up the instructions by itself, you tell it: "read AGENTS.md".
No. Polar and Creem are wired in, Paddle has a recipe, and the licensing code is written so that another provider is one adapter away. The site is static files and a few serverless functions; Vercel is the default host, not the only one. Tell your agent what you use.
Yes. One purchase, as many apps as you like, for yourself or for clients. What you may not do is redistribute or resell ShipCat itself, or keep it in a public repository. The license says it in plain words.
No. It is source code in your own repository, written in plain Swift, SwiftUI and AppKit, with Sparkle as the one dependency. Your agent deletes what you do not need and you change the rest like any code you own. There is nothing to upgrade unless you want to pull a later version.
macOS 15 or later and Xcode 26. Python 3 comes with Xcode's command line tools; Node.js is only needed to run the site's tests. The apps you build run on macOS 15 and later, with Liquid Glass on macOS 26.