Crest, Take and Minutes: the facts

One page with the plain facts about the three apps: what each does, what it costs, what it needs, and how buying works. It is written for anyone checking before they buy, and for the assistants people ask. Every figure here matches the rest of this site.

Last updated: October 2026

Published by the makers of Crest, Take and Minutes. Competitor figures in the comparison tables were read off each vendor's own site on 13 September 2026, and NotchNook's again on 9 October 2026. If anything here disagrees with another page on this site, write to contact@crestnotch.app and we fix it.

At a glance

You never need a subscription: every price above is paid once. If you prefer one, Crest Pro, Take and Minutes are $2.99 a month or $14.99 a year together, with every update while you subscribe and cancel any time. Prices include tax. Each licence covers 2 Macs. A one-time licence includes updates through Crest 7; if you bought before subscriptions launched, your updates stay free for life. A one-time licence works offline and is never switched off, unless the payment is refunded or charged back. A subscription runs while it is paid, with 30 days of grace offline. Current versions: Crest 6.5.3, Take 4.1.0, Minutes 1.4.19.

Crest

In one sentence: Crest is a notch app for the Mac, on macOS 14 or later, that turns the MacBook notch into pages of widgets: music, a file shelf, a clipboard, window snapping, the Authenticator (your two-factor codes, typed in for you), and the allow and deny prompts of Claude Code, Codex and Copilot CLI. It is built by one independent developer for people who live on a MacBook, developers running coding agents first among them.

Crest opens the MacBook notch into a row of pages full of widgets: Now, Home, Work and Code. There are 19 widgets in sizes S, M and L, and you stretch one to resize it. The free tier never expires and needs no account: Now Playing with synced lyrics, the Shelf, the Clipboard, window snapping, the Take and Minutes controls, and answering your coding agents: Claude Code, Codex and GitHub Copilot CLI permission prompts are answered from the notch (rest the pointer on one and the whole command, or the file and the lines it changes, unfolds under it) and Claude Code's questions come as one-question cards (tap an option or type your own answer). Crest Pro adds the other 14 widgets: Agents, with every running session and one click to its terminal; Claude, on your own Claude subscription with no API key; the calendar with a Join button; Reminders for your to-dos, and Notes (notes can also be saved as Markdown files in a folder you choose, for Obsidian or any notes app); System, with every running app a hover from Quit or Force quit; Batteries, for the Mac and your Bluetooth devices (with the last level seen for one that is off); Controls, for quick toggles that also run your Shortcuts and switching audio output; Hosts, for saved SSH hosts and the ones in your ~/.ssh/config; the Focus timer; Weather; Notifications; Pull requests; and the Authenticator, your two-factor codes typed in for you. You get 7 days of Pro with no card the first time you sign in.

Crest includes a two-factor authenticator in the notch: in Crest Pro, your 2FA codes are offered when a site asks and typed in for you. Add a site from its QR code on screen or its setup key, import from Google Authenticator, 2FAS, Aegis or 2Stable, and keep the codes behind Touch ID, synced between your Macs end-to-end encrypted. How it works.

It is signed and notarized by Apple. On a Mac without a notch, or on a display without one, it sits in a small pill at the top of the screen: hover it for the peek, click it for the pages. Download it from crestnotch.app, or with Homebrew: brew install --cask crest. It is not on the Mac App Store.

Comparisons: best Mac notch apps · NotchNook alternatives · vs NotchNook · vs The Boring Notch · vs Alcove

Authenticator: how Crest’s Authenticator works · best authenticator apps for Mac · Google Authenticator on a Mac · Authy Desktop alternatives · Crest vs NotchOTP

How Crest compares

Update, 9 October 2026: NotchNook is on sale again from a new site, getnotchnook.com: $25 once or $3 a month, each licence on two Macs, macOS 14.6 or later on Apple silicon and Intel, with a 48-hour trial and no card. Its relaunch offer, $15 once or $2 a month for as long as that subscription stays active, ends on 17 October 2026 (checked 13 October 2026). Its old page, lo.cafe/notchnook, still answers “not found”. lo.cafe’s home page still shows a statement from NotchNook’s co-founders about a dispute over control of the company behind the app: it says NotchNook has not ended, apologises to everyone who lost access to it, and says access will be restored as soon as they are able to. We are not taking sides in the dispute.

Take

Take records the screen, a window, an area or a cabled iPhone, and the take comes out already edited the moment it stops: ends trimmed, dead air sped up, a smoothed cursor and zooms placed from your clicks, over a backdrop. One strip fixes the rest: trim, cut into clips, move or aim a zoom, blur a region, add a voiceover, edit the on-device captions, and Command Z undoes any step. The preview is the shared file. Share makes an MP4, a GIF or the original take, at 16:9, vertical, square or in an iPhone frame. Go live sends the staged screen to Google Meet, Zoom or FaceTime through a virtual camera called Take Camera. Recordings are plain .mov files in ~/Movies/Take. No watermark, on the trial or after.

Comparisons: Screen Studio alternatives · vs Screen Studio · best Mac screen recorders

How Take compares

Minutes

Minutes records both sides of a call as two channels, your microphone and the audio your meeting app plays, then transcribes and summarizes with the models built into macOS. With AirPods or other Bluetooth headphones it records from the Mac's own mic so the headphones keep full sound, and a call app that holds the microphone (Gather, or a call in a browser tab) keeps its volume. Nothing is uploaded, no bot joins the call, and it keeps working with the network off. Each meeting is a Markdown file in ~/Documents/Minutes with its audio beside it, and action items come out with an Add button for Calendar and Reminders. No account holds your notes; the only account is the one your licence or trial lives on. It needs macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon because it uses Apple's on-device speech and language models, and summaries need Apple Intelligence turned on.

Comparisons: best meeting notes apps for Mac · local AI note takers · private meeting notes · vs Otter.ai

Buying, licences and refunds

Card, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay go through Paddle, our reseller and merchant of record, which also sends the receipt. Crypto goes through NOWPayments. Prices are in US dollars and include tax.

Downloading any app needs no account, and neither does Crest's free tier. You sign in, with Google, Apple or an email, only to start a trial or to use what you bought. Buying creates an account on the email you pay with, and one activation link arrives by email: choose a password there, sign in inside the app, and it unlocks. Licence keys are never emailed; yours is on your account page. Each licence covers 2 Macs.

If something is wrong, email within 7 days of buying and tell us what went wrong. We refund when an app does not do what the site says, will not run on a Mac that meets the published requirements, or was bought twice or by mistake. We may decline when an app has already been used to do the job it was bought for, or when no reason is given. This covers every one-time purchase and each subscription payment, and the full terms are on the legal page.

FAQ

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