Letra
Product Hunt Nikhil Barik
Letra turns text from screens, scans, and videos into copyable text on a Mac. It also scans QR codes and keeps searchable history, for a one-time $5.99.
Based on reporting by Product Hunt, Nikhil Barik — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Letra is a Mac menu bar app built for a very specific annoyance: you can see the words, but you can’t copy them. A line in a screen share, a snippet in a video, text trapped in a scanned PDF — the app tries to make all of that behave like normal clipboard text.
The workflow is as blunt as it gets: press Shift-Command-2, drag over the area you want, and paste the result. That’s the whole pitch, and honestly that’s probably why it makes sense. No browser dance. No extra steps. Just select, extract, move on.
It also goes beyond plain OCR. Letra includes QR scanning, supports multiple languages, and keeps a searchable history of what you’ve captured. That last part matters more than it sounds like it should; once text gets rescued from a screenshot or a PDF, being able to find it again saves the feature from becoming a one-off trick.
The pricing is equally straightforward: $5.99 once, with no subscription. In a market that loves turning tiny utilities into monthly commitments, that alone will be enough to get some attention.
It’s a small tool, but the use case is real. The best productivity apps often win by removing one irritating micro-task, not by promising to reorganize a person’s life.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of utility that makes subscriptions look a bit silly. Small, sharp tools should be one-time buys, especially when they live in a menu bar and do one job well. The real win here is not OCR; it’s the refusal to turn a simple clipboard fix into a grand platform story.
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