ShotSolve

ShotSolve is a free macOS menubar app that sends screenshots to GPT-4o so you can ask questions about anything visible on screen. It requires your own OpenAI API key and leans on the engine behind BoltAI for its chat interface and advanced model settings.

ShotSolve is a free Mac menubar utility that turns any screenshot into a question for GPT-4o. The workflow is deliberately short: capture an area of the screen with a keyboard shortcut (Command + Shift + 1 by default), type what you want to know, and read the model's response in a chat window. It is built by Daniel Nguyen as a companion to BoltAI, the paid ChatGPT desktop app he develops, and ShotSolve reuses BoltAI's underlying engine while shipping as a standalone free download for macOS 12 and later on both Intel and Apple Silicon. The app is aimed at people who already pay for OpenAI API access and want a faster path from something on screen to an explanation of it. The author's own examples include turning a Figma design into generated and previewable code, critiquing a design, gathering UI and UX feedback on software, evaluating marketing material, getting contextual help inside an application, and producing programming tutorials. In practice a user sets a system instruction and optionally a pre configured prompt, then runs that prompt against each new screenshot, which makes repeated analysis tasks faster than retyping the same request. Under the hood ShotSolve exposes a fair amount of OpenAI configuration for a free tool. A custom API host is supported, along with context limits, custom system instructions, temperature, presence penalty and frequency penalty. The chat interface handles light and dark modes, adjustable font and line spacing, a separate font and theme for code blocks, message editing, deletion and answer regeneration. Recent versions added LaTeX rendering and made GPT-4o the default model. Where ShotSolve fits is narrow by design. It is not a general chat client and it does not work with a standard ChatGPT subscription, so anyone without an API key and a payment method on file cannot use it. Buyers comparing it to full desktop ChatGPT clients should treat ShotSolve as a focused capture tool and look at BoltAI itself for the broader feature set. The trade off for that focus is simplicity, speed and no account requirement beyond the API key.