The Screen Studio alternative that shows your keystrokes — and costs $34 once

Screen Studio is a polished Mac screen recorder that auto-zooms toward your actions and smooths your cursor in the exported video. It’s excellent — but it now costs $20/month ($240 a year) and discontinued its one-time lifetime license, and it won’t put your keystrokes on screen.

Limelight matches the part people actually want: hit record and it auto-zooms into every click, smooths your cursor, drops the video on a clean background with padding and rounded corners, then exports a sharp mp4 or a vertical 9:16 clip. You can trim, cut, and speed up, and everything happens on your Mac — nothing is uploaded.

Then it adds what Screen Studio can’t. Limelight shows your keystrokes and clicks right in the recording, plus a live cursor spotlight and freehand annotations — so coding tutorials and product demos are easy to follow without bolting on a separate KeyCastr window. There’s a free cursor spotlight to try, and Pro is a one-time $34 (or $2.99/month) with every future update included.

Switch to Limelight if you want the Screen Studio look plus on-screen keystrokes, and you’d rather pay once than subscribe forever. Keep Screen Studio if you need its webcam overlay or its share-link cloud. For most tutorial and demo creators on macOS, Limelight does the job for a fraction of the lifetime cost.