Image and video decision
AI Captions
A single developer can build a minimal pay-per-video captioning service with existing ASR APIs and FFmpeg in about a week; the vendor’s added polish and brand are the main things you’d forgo.
Visit website↗Built by Sam T, who ships 4 products in this index
Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$50one-off25 h to build
$30/mo3 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Upload a video, run ASR to get timestamps, render styled burned-in captions onto the video, produce a short watermarked preview, then produce the full unwatermarked video after one-time payment.
What it still won’t have
- Polished multi-style caption presets and visual preview UI
- One-click pay-per-video checkout flow tuned to non-technical users
- Any proprietary optimizations the vendor may use for caption accuracy or rendering performance
- Customer support and brand trust
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
AI Captions does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a single-tenant web service (React frontend, Node.js/Express backend, Postgres for jobs/metadata, S3-compatible storage) that: 1) accepts MP4/MOV/WebM uploads with server-side validation and presigned uploads; 2) calls an ASR API (or runs Whisper locally) to produce time-aligned captions; 3) provides a UI to choose caption style (font, color, highlight, border, size, screen spot) and preview settings; 4) produces a short watermarked preview clip (trim + overlay captions + watermark) and a full export pipeline that renders burned-in captions using FFmpeg overlay filters; 5) integrates a one-time payment checkout (Stripe) to unlock full downloads and triggers final rendering; Out of scope: multi-user accounts, team admin features, translation/dubbing, mobile apps. Include error handling, retrying for failed transcode jobs, job queueing (e.g. Bull), logging, and automated tests covering uploads, ASR integration, and export completion.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- 3 cited sources+3
- Evidence score81
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productBest AI Captions — official product page
- official pricingBest AI Captions — pricing
- official docsBest AI Captions — features
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
