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What's free vs. the unlock

Purrchiver is free to download from the Mac App Store, and the free tier is a complete, standalone archive tool — not a crippled trial. A single optional one-time $9.99 in-app purchase unlocks the advanced features. No subscription, no account, no upsells, and it’s verified locally on your Mac — so unlocking needs no network.

The rule of thumb: opening and extracting anything is always free. The unlock only ever gates authoring the advanced stuff — certain create formats, encryption, splitting, editing in place, and automation.

Free on the Mac App Store

Everything you need to receive and open archives other people send you:

  • Open & extract every supported format — ZIP, RAR (incl. multi-part and encrypted), 7z (incl. encrypted), tar and its compressed variants, ISO, AAR/AEA, DMG, and the rest of the matrix — including encrypted archives, as long as you have the password.
  • Quick Look preview — press Space on an archive in Finder to see what’s inside without opening the app. (more)
  • Test integrity — re-read any archive on demand to confirm it’s intact.
  • Batch extract — drop a whole pile of archives and extract them all to one destination. (more)
  • Create the common plain formats — ZIP, AAR, tar, .tar.gz, .gz, .tar.bz2, .bz2, plain (unencrypted) DMG, and a plain copy.
  • Browse an opened archive — open an archive and look through its contents freely.

The one-time unlock adds

The advanced authoring features, for the people who create archives, not just open them:

  • More create formats — 7z, xz, Zstandard, Brotli, lzip, lz4, LZMA, ISO 9660, CPIO, and the compressed-tar variants .tar.xz / .tar.zst / .tar.lz / .tar.lz4 / .tar.br.
  • Encryption — authoring any encrypted archive: ZIP and 7z AES-256, Apple Encrypted Archive (AEA), encrypted DMG, and the universal age wrap that can encrypt any container. (more)
  • Split archives — write a multi-volume set (numbered .001 / .002 / … volumes) for any splittable format. (more)
  • Edit archives in place — add and remove entries inside an archive you already have, then save. (more)
  • Batch create & encrypt — apply create/encrypt settings across many items at once.
  • Shortcuts & App Intents — the full set of automation actions for the Shortcuts app, Siri, and Spotlight. (more)

A few things worth calling out, because they’re easy to misread:

  • Reading is always free — opening, extracting, and previewing an encrypted archive someone sends you is free. The unlock is for creating encrypted archives.
  • Browsing is free; editing is the unlock — opening an archive to look through it is free; adding/removing entries and saving is the unlock.
  • Splitting any format needs the unlock — even a split ZIP, because writing a multi-volume set is an advanced operation regardless of format.

How to unlock — or restore

You’ll be offered the unlock at the moment you reach for a paid feature (the Create sheet’s lock badges mark which formats, encryption, and options need it). You can also unlock or restore at any time:

  • Purrchiver menu → Unlock Advanced Features… (and Restore Purchases)
  • Purrchiver → About Purrchiver, which carries the same Unlock and Restore buttons.

Already bought it on another Mac signed into the same Apple Account? Use Restore Purchases — there’s no separate login, because there’s no Purrchiver account. Entitlement is checked locally against the App Store, consistent with Purrchiver’s no-network promise.