I’ll give this a whirl. Raycast does enough things well that having it running alongside Alfred for a handful of tasks would be worth it, but I found that Raycast consistently would use 500-1GB of RAM, making it a non-starter even on my Mini with lots of RAM. And that was version 1. By all accounts Tinycast is closer to Alfred in terms of memory usage.
Even Raycast themselves estimate their usage for v2 at 350-450mb, so what you’re seeing is not normal.
And that ignores the many complaints you’ll see on Reddit and others about ballooning ram over time.
That’s probably closer to it, a different market rather than the same market minus the features. The vocal contingent complaining about Electron and bloat online skews toward people who’ve already decided they don’t need the rich feature set, not power users talking themselves out of it. The Raycast power users you’re describing aren’t going anywhere, and Tinycast almost certainly isn’t trying to win them.
What’s harder to see from outside is how big the other group actually is: people who trigger three or four things a day (app switch, calculator, maybe a snippet) and never touch half of what a launcher ships with. For them a small, fast, native tool that does exactly that isn’t a downgrade, it’s just less stuff to load and think about. Whether Tinycast stays that small once it has real usage and feature requests is the actual interesting question, plenty of “does one thing well” tools drift the other way once growth becomes the goal instead of leanness.
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