Image and video decision
Subscut
A competent technical user can build and run a useful replacement by wiring open-source clipping/transcription tools and FFmpeg; Subscut's value is product polish, scale and support rather than irreproducible proprietary moat.
Visit website↗Built by Arrpit Tiwari, who ships 3 products in this index
$9/mo
$108/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off160 h to build
$200/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 24 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Subscut alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Ingest an uploaded MP4, transcribe and detect high-value moments, generate burnt-in captions and 9:16 reframed clips, and expose a simple API/CLI to request processing.
What it still won’t have
- Polished, production-hardened UI/UX and polish of the hosted product
- Scale and reliability guarantees (CDN, queueing, autoscaling)
- Ongoing product improvements, A/B tuning and analytics
- Commercial support, refunds and payments handling
- Any proprietary model tuning or internal datasets Subscut may use
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 24 seats.
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 self-hosted video-to-shorts service using: Python (FastAPI), PostgreSQL, S3-compatible storage, Redis for job queue, FFmpeg, Whisper or cloud ASR, and a small React admin UI. In scope: HTTP MP4 upload and storage, background transcription with word-level timings, a simple LLM/heuristic pipeline to score and select up to 10 clip candidates per video, FFmpeg-based clipping and smart 9:16 reframing (face detection/centering), burn-in captions using timing, an API to submit jobs and download outputs, and a basic web UI to review and export clips. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing, large-scale autoscaling, analytics dashboards, and model training. Include error handling, retries for failed jobs, logging, and unit/integration tests for the API and processing pipeline.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score89
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 · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official pricingSubscut homepage
- official productSubscut homepage
- open sourcezhouxiaoka/autoclip
- open sourcemodelscope/FunClip
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
