The Free Alternative to Every Creator Tool You Pay For
Seven open-source apps that replace Buffer, ElevenLabs, Premiere Pro, OpusClip, Loom and Descript, each installed and demoed by an AI agent.
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Review
educational
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
A coding agent can install and customize open-source copies of paid creator tools, so most subscriptions can be replaced by free software you own, as long as you accept each tool's trade-offs.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A solo creator paying monthly for Buffer, ElevenLabs, Loom, Descript or an AI clipping tool who wants to know which free alternative is actually worth switching to.
Someone already using Claude Code or another coding agent who wants concrete GitHub repos their agent can install and drive from one prompt.
A creator who edits video and wants an agent-written cut that still opens on a real timeline for manual fixes.
SKIP IF…
You want deep setup tutorials. Each tool gets two to four minutes and the installs are shown as agent prompts, not step-by-step guides.
You need client review links, generative video extend, or multitrack color work. The video flags these as missing from the free options.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Warner argues that paid creator software is increasingly easy to replace because open-source clones exist and a coding agent can install and customize them from a single GitHub link. He covers seven pairs: Postiz for Buffer, Voicebox for ElevenLabs, Kdenlive for Premiere Pro, OpenShorts for OpenClips, MoneyPrinterTurbo for AI video credits, OBS Studio for Loom, and Rescript for Descript. Each comes with a named downside, such as server upkeep, no Linux build, slow processing without a GPU, or no upload link. The recurring advice is to pair agent edits with a visible timeline and to generate several variations instead of micro-prompting one.
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Promise: free, customizable replacements for paid creator software.
00:18 – 03:09
02 · Postiz replaces Buffer
One calendar, 15+ networks, agent-driven scheduling, free self-hosted version with every paid feature.
03:09 – 06:18
03 · Voicebox replaces ElevenLabs
Local voice studio with cloning, text-to-speech and dictation, plus an MCP server for agents. No Linux build yet.
06:18 – 06:48
04 · Subscriber goal
Mid-roll ask to reach 100,000 subscribers.
06:48 – 09:36
05 · Kdenlive replaces Premiere Pro
Agent writes the edit as a plain-text project and opens it on a timeline so a human can scrub.
09:36 – 10:21
06 · Agent edit demo
Cutting one sentence from a Mixergy clip, snapped to a pause, saved as a Kdenlive project.
10:21 – 11:33
07 · Zapier Next Gen Zaps
Sponsor segment on cheap, code-driven automations that keep tokens for judgment work.
11:33 – 13:21
08 · OpenShorts replaces OpenClips
Local long-to-vertical clipper with no minute cap or watermark, 8 GB RAM and Docker required.
13:21 – 15:54
09 · Agent clip demo and the timeline problem
Two prompts, imperfect cuts, and why generating variations beats chat micro-edits.
15:54 – 19:39
10 · MoneyPrinterTurbo
One topic in, finished video out, using stock footage, free Edge voices and batch rendering.
19:39 – 23:51
11 · OBS Studio replaces Loom
Screen, window and camera recording with scenes, but no upload or share link.
23:51 – 27:30
12 · Rescript replaces Descript
Edit the transcript to edit the video, export to Premiere, DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut.
27:30 – 28:08
13 · Sign-off
Ask for comments and subscriptions, and a reminder to customize any tool with your agent.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Per-channel pricing is what makes social schedulers expensive: every added network adds a charge, and the yearly total reaches hundreds of dollars.
Postiz's free GitHub version has every feature of the paid hosted version. The only cost is running the server yourself.
If a self-hosted scheduler crashes, a post goes up late instead of never, which most creators can tolerate.
Voicebox bundles voice cloning, text-to-speech and dictation in one app, so it can replace a dictation subscription too.
Voice cloning in Voicebox did not work on a machine without a graphics card, while stock voices did.
Agent-edited video still needs a timeline. Chatting your way to a tighter cut is slow, and scrubbing a little more or less is fast.
Kdenlive saves projects in plain text, which is why an agent can write the edit and a human can open it on the timeline.
Hiring editors on a Philippines or India subscription can cut Premiere Pro's price substantially.
AI clip tools struggle most with screen-share footage. Interviews and solo talks are easy because they just stack the two speakers.
Prompting an agent for an exact short-form edit is hard, so generate several variations and pick one instead of micro-editing by chat.
OpenShorts runs locally with no minute cap and no watermark, but needs 8 GB of memory, Docker, and 5 to 8 minutes for an 8-minute video without a GPU.
MoneyPrinterTurbo turns one topic into a finished video using free stock footage and free Edge voices, so quality depends on how much effort the prompt gets.
OBS Studio works as a Loom replacement because it records screen, window and camera, but it stops at the file and gives you no share link.
Zapier's Next Gen Zaps let a cheap automation watch for events and wake the agent only when needed, so tokens are not spent on polling.
Rescript is a near copy of Descript's text-based editing, which fits the trend of every paid app getting a simplified free clone.
Rescript has no color tools, no multitrack and no music bed, and the creator treats that as a feature.
Takeaway
Swap subscriptions for repos you can check
WHAT TO LEARN
Most paid creator tools now have a free, agent-friendly clone, and the useful skill is knowing each clone's limits before you cancel anything.
Check what you pay per channel, per minute or per credit first. Those usage-based meters are what make Buffer, ElevenLabs and clipping tools pile up.
Self-hosting trades money for upkeep. A scheduler that goes down only delays a post, but you are now the one who restarts it.
Hardware decides what works. Voice cloning and clip rendering need a graphics card to be practical, and Voicebox has no Linux build yet.
Let the agent do the first cut, then open it on a timeline. A few seconds of scrubbing beats another round of chat prompts.
Ask for several variations of an AI edit and pick the best, instead of prompting one clip toward exactly what you pictured.
Screen-share footage still trips up automatic vertical clippers, while interviews and solo talks convert cleanly.
Free tools often stop short of the paid extras: no share link in OBS, no client review in Kdenlive, no color or multitrack in Rescript. Decide if you need them.
Hand repetitive checks like calendar or email watching to cheap rule-based automation, and spend agent tokens only on decisions.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Self-hosting
Running a piece of software on your own computer or server instead of paying a company to run it for you. You own the setup and the upkeep.
MCP server
A connector that lets a coding agent such as Claude Code call another app's tools directly, for example telling Voicebox to create a voice profile.
Text-based editing
Editing video by deleting words in its transcript, which removes the matching video and audio. Descript popularized it and Rescript copies it.
Next Gen Zaps
Zapier automations built from a plain-language description, where plain code handles repeated steps and AI is used only where judgment is needed.
Docker
A tool that packages an app and its dependencies into a container so it runs the same on any machine. OpenShorts requires it.
“Everyone's copying every freaking paid app right now and making a simplified alternative version of it.”
Short, punchy statement of the trend the whole video rides on.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
14:00
“It's too hard to chat your edits through.”
Clear, quotable reason a timeline still matters.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
26:40
“You don't have to cancel all your subscriptions. If it helps you cancel one subscription, great.”
Low-pressure close that works standalone.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
analogystory
You're about to level up your content game and cut down your subscriptions because I'm about to show you seven free alternatives to the software that you know and love for creating content. And more than free, this is about being able to customize a software to your needs. Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company.
Timestamps, links below so you can get all this software immediately and skip around to what you need. Starting with Post -its, which replaces Buffer. Now, we know Buffer as a hugely popular social media scheduling tool.
that so many people use to publish to LinkedIn, to YouTube, to Instagram, etc. But people are complaining about it because every extra channel adds another charge to their bill. Scheduled posts have failed for some people.
Analytics aren't what they're looking for. And it can be pretty expensive because you can pay per channel and then it builds up per month. And of course, as you multiply it for the year, we're looking at hundreds of dollars, which is what many people are paying for this.
Meanwhile, there's an alternative called Post -its. It is a social media scheduler that is more than just free, as you'll see. It is meant to be run by AI agents.
That means your Claude, your Grokbot, your whatever it is that you're using can come up with the ideas. But more importantly. Start to schedule it on your behalf.
And that means that what you get with this is one calendar for every network that you post to. So you see it all together on a calendar like you see on the right. You write it once.
It can post to Instagram, to YouTube, to LinkedIn, to Reddit, to TikTok, to X. It's kind of weird. I've talked to the creator.
You could even publish to Slack. I mean, the guy just went overkill with what his software will do. And yes, it'll work the same way on Mac or Windows and on a cheap server.
More importantly. You can use Cloud Code and other agents, as you can see here, to change the software and customize it to your need. This is everything that it ships with, including schedule to 15 or more networks from one calendar.
Get every feature that he does have a paid version of this. If you don't want to host it yourself and you don't want to customize it, you just want to run with what he has. He has a paid version.
But this version that you get on GitHub, and I'll link to all this below. has all the features that the paid version has. All it means is that you're going to have to run it yourself on your computer.
But if you're comfortable doing that, you've got all these features. I interviewed this founder months ago, showed how the software worked. Back then, he was on an upward tick where people were paying him to run this.
But as always, it's available for free and the software continues to do well. A couple of things worth noticing, and I'm going to tell you about every one of them, what some of the downsides are. With this one, the big downside is that you're going to have to keep track of the server yourself.
And if it's an issue, if for some reason it crashes, if there's a problem, then your post won't go up. But you know what?
For most of us, if a post doesn't go up at 9 o 'clock in the morning and it goes up later in the day, it's fine. It's not a huge issue here. By the way, I had my agent install this on our computer.
To see what it would look like with one installation, this is what it did look like on our computer. And you can see the standard stuff that I as a human being can interact with it. So if I want to use it and not have my agent, it looks so simple and it is easy for anyone to use.
It's a huge discovery. A lot of people are now copying this software for whatever reason. You don't need to.
It's free, available for you, and that's the first one. Let's go to the next one. Eleven Labs is a hugely...
popular software, I'm going to show you why voice box could be your better alternative. 11 Labs, it's known for the voice cloning tool that it has, where it can take your voice or other voices and make a version of it. The problem with it is it's expensive.
It burns through tokens. You're really connected into their software. And the price really can start to build up.
People are paying a few hundred bucks a year for this. And if what you're trying to do is create some content for yourself, maybe you don't need to pay for the 11 Labs expensive subscription for everything. Maybe you can cut back and say, I'm going to use VoiceBox.
is a voice studio that you install on your computer. And the thing that I like about it and the reason I'm recommending it is it is like an app like any other that you're going to be familiar with. But at the same time, you're going to be able to have your agent interact with it by just, you know, the CLI.
So it's from a developer who created SpaceDrive, the open source file manager. This has been around for a bit. It's strong.
It's powerful. So it speaks the text that you give it. Oh, and it types what you say.
I don't know that this matters so much anymore, but you know those dictation apps where you press one button, you speak, and it types out what you've said, and they cost, what, $15 a month if you're thinking about WhisperSync? I know Willow does a free version, but I think after a few uses, it jumps to $15 a month. Anyway, for some reason, VoiceBox installed that as a free addition to this.
So yes, you will be able to have text go in there, and it will speak it for you, but at the same time, you could also... Speak and then it'll transcribe everything basically. It's a super powerful app It ships with so many things including that voice cloning that I was talking about the dictation Let's take a look just go over to the github repo just so you see that it's more than just this thing which might scare some people for github it is let's go over to their web page and You can see right here easy to download and Oh man, in the past I've shown this and I've actually done the Samuel L.
Jackson voice where you can just click around here and make it play. I don't know why I can't get it to play right now. What was I doing it before?
Okay, let's continue on. Of course, I'll have a link to this so you can see it yourself. Worth noticing, there's no Linux build yet, which means that my agent that's been installing this on Linux wasn't able to install it on his box.
It's not a huge deal for most of us. The more important thing is, Oh, here.
Let's also say that on a computer with no graphics card, the stock voice worked, but the voice cloning did not. So it is going to be harder if you don't have a graphics card. But look at this.
Here's what my agent did. It basically typed in install voice box and it gave the GitHub link. Then it says following the readme file started connected MCP server to connect it to cloud code.
And then the second prompt that it gave is using voice box MCP tools, make a voice profile named Robbie that uses the. Kokoro preset voice. Only if it doesn't already exist, then have it say, Hi, I'm Ravi.
This voice came from VoiceBox. Here's what it sounds like. Hi, I'm Ravi, and this voice came from VoiceBox.
Hi, I'm... Boom. You see it?
Easy to use. Let's go on to the... Oh.
Oh, man. I'm on the verge of getting to 100 ,000 subscribers, and I could use your help. Actually, I'm getting close to it.
I'm at 67 ,000 today. I think I should be at 70 ,000 by the end of the month. I'd love your help to get to 100 ,000, and I'm publishing frequently to try to get there.
If you like this, if you want to support this work, subscribe. And, of course, by subscribing, you'll be helping me get more guests on here who go through and explain their repos just like so many others have done here. Let's move on.
Okay, next. I've got Kdenlive, which replaces Premiere Pro or so many other video editing platforms. Now, you know Adobe Premiere Pro, hugely popular video editor.
For most people, it's absolutely overkill. If you decide that you do want to pay for it, I have a little trick for how to pay for it. I don't know that I call it a trick.
Our editors are in the Philippines, and so we just have them subscribe in the Philippines for the software, which ends up being super cheap. So if you've got somebody who is in a country like the Philippines, India, you will get a lower price on it if you decide that you want to pay for it. Now, there are problems with it.
People are complaining about freezing. People are complaining about rollbacks. Honestly, the biggest issue, though, is the price.
You don't want to pay this much money for a video editor in a world where what you want is your agent to help you edit videos. You don't want the same old thing with the timeline unless you're like our editors who are really high -end editors who do need to do a lot of work. And even they are shifting more and more of their work to agentic editing.
Kdenlive, it's a full video editor that you install on your computer, and this is why I picked it, and your coding agent can build and edit for you and hand you the finished product. Now, a lot of people on YouTube are talking about how amazing it is that you can take video and hand it over to ChatGPT or Cloud Code and have it edit.
I do this all the time. It is wonderful. It's amazing.
Here's the problem with it. You don't want to just see the finished product back and edit by chatting back to it. Sometimes you need to see the timeline.
You know what I'm talking about? That way you can just kind of cut a little bit more or a little bit less. That's what this is about.
Here's why it matters. Cloud Code writes the edit, but you open it on the timeline right here so that you can just scrub and move things over. That little bit of change.
It's going to help your editing tremendously. So yes, absolutely have Cloud Code Edit. If you're paying for ChatGPT, have it edit.
And so many other tools are now getting into it. But have this timeline so you can do it. Here's what it ships with.
You're going to cut on a timeline. I keep editing this into every part of this and into my conversation here because I think that's super important. That timeline that an agent can fill and you can scrub and edit.
Even if you're just talking about family videos, it's going to be great. But if you're posting to social, you're going to want it. You're going to open and save projects in plain text that your agent can write, installs on a Mac, on Windows, on Linux, free, no account needed.
I don't know how people are doing all this for us. Okay, worth noticing. There's no AI that adds frames to a clip like Premiere's generative extend.
Who cares? There's no built -in review links for clients, which Premiere gets from frame .io. Again.
Who cares? I'm actually going to show you a way for your clients to give you feedback on edits later. It's a tool called re...
What is it called? Not Descript, but Rescript. You're going to see it later on.
Okay. We tried it over here, gave it a couple of commands. First command, install kdenlive, and we just give it the URL for GitHub.
This is the way that I like to install and start using anything. And then the second prompt is use kdenlive to cut one sentence that... can go from a short .mp4 clip.
This is from my old Mixergy interview clip. Mixergy is where I've done interviews for over a decade. And then snap the cut to a pause so no word gets chopped.
Save it as a Kdenlive project. Open it in Kdenlive so I can see it. All right, bottom line.
You're going to have this so you can go and see what it looks like if you want to hit play and listen to it. But you can see the more important thing is, do I have to say this over and over again? Let me zoom in.
Look at that. You get to actually see my guest on the timeline with the cut so I can scrub. I can edit a little bit more.
Okay. Am I getting a little too passionate about this? I hope so.
All right, next. Zapier. Yes, they are paid, but you should know that they have a free...
The free version of it that you can use. Here's why Zapier is important. Whenever you're working with agents like I do, the agents are going to do work and it's going to start to get expensive, especially if they're doing work that is repetitive, monotonous over and over again.
They're going to start to not hallucinate, but they start to. Predict what you need. Sometimes, often, those predictions are right.
Sometimes they are wrong. And those predictions and all that brain power is expensive. So what I've done is I've said, hey, Zapier, you are going to be my tool within Grokbot, within all my other agents, that when there's stuff that's repetitive, like checking my calendar, like checking my email, like, what is it, waiting for a granola or grain meeting note to be done.
I don't want my agent to spend all its time and all its tokens doing it. I want Zapier to just be notified as soon as one of those actions happens and then tell the agent what to do. That's how I use it.
It's called Next Gen Zaps where the intelligence is left for your agents and the automation is left to code. So it's super cheap and I'll have a link to it below. And yes, there is a free version of it.
And I know many of you are just on the free version. Enjoy. Let's move on.
Next, OpenShorts replaces OpenClips. Now, OpenClip, OpenClips, I should say OpenClip, it's a hugely popular AI tool that turns long videos into short clips. I give it a long -form interview, and it cuts down and finds me clips that I want.
The problem is that it cuts down what is often random and irrelevant clips, and a lot of people are saying that, you know what? I actually find that the biggest issue that I have with it, I think it's very good, very, very good software. The problem is that I'm still not getting it to find the clips that I need from it, and I end up paying for it.
Yeah, and the price does go up. You're looking at $15 a month for the starter, $29 for the pro, and if you're looking at the pro, you're going to be paying $348 a year. Do my math for me.
Apparently I've gotten the math wrong on some of these in the past. I'm not trying to give you an accounting of what you're going to be paying exactly. I'm trying to give you a sense of where the cost is and where you're going to be saving.
So what is OpenShorts? It turns a long form video into a ready to post vertical clip and it runs on your machine with no minute cap, meaning go as long as you want and no watermark. Let me show it to you.
they also have a web version that is not free if you want them to host it and so i'm going to click over into this and i'm going to go to openshorts .app oh here first of all this is a good video visualization you can see how it took this long form video and it put it into this vertical format In past videos, I've shown you how I've gone in.
I wonder if I'm still logged in. I bet I am still logged in. Yeah, it looks like I am logged in.
And you can just kind of drop your videos in here and start to play around with it to get a sense of what it looks like and how it functions. So if you don't want to install it for yourself and you just want to play around with it, that's an easy way for you to do it. Here's why it matters.
If you've got long -form video, you can just give it a podcast, a webinar, a live stream, and it will start to clip for you. Here's where I actually have a problem with this. almost all of these.
If you're doing what I'm doing, which is showing your screen in addition to talking to someone, all of these tools have a hard time with it. But if what you're doing is an interview or a solo or even like a Zoom meeting that you want to turn into clips, it's a lot easier for them because what they'll do is they'll basically stack the two speakers, they'll adjust it, they'll edit, they know how to handle it.
So here's what you get with it. You're going to paste a video link to a horizontal file. You're going to get vertical clips back.
It's going to happen automagically. You're going to be a little irritated by it, and you can make some changes. I'm going to show you what that looks like in a moment.
But here's what you need to know. You need a computer with at least 8 gigabytes of memory and Docker, and it is slow without a graphics card. About 5 to 8 minutes for an 8 -minute video.
Most people are not going to care about that. If you do want to add an AI actor, it's going to cost you money. For most people, that's not what they're doing with it.
What they're doing is they're just cutting out clips. Okay, here's me. This is an old video that I did of myself, and these are the prompts that we gave it.
I said, Claude Code, install OpenShorts, then use OpenShorts to turn my 9 minute 39 second Mixergy video, how to win startup competitions, into one vertical. Here's what it did. The first version that it gave me was.
This.
And I found that this wasn't setting up enough context. So we came back and we gave it another one. And I said, make an edit to it.
And again, using the chat, you can make an edit. And here's what it looked like afterwards.
So you see how with the second prompt, I didn't end up getting the exact cut that I wanted, even though I told it, you need to give more of a setup. it's hard to prompt and get the edits that you're looking for. So what most people will do with open shorts is, and what I did with open shorts is just have it create a bunch of different variations and then start working with it.
But when I say a timeline is a better way to edit, and I talked about that with Kdenlive, this is what I'm talking about. I can't come back here and say, now use open shorts clip editor to recut the short so that it opens with me saying, yes, there is a bias, it's unfair. It's too hard to chat your edits through.
So again, if you're using this, and also the same thing is true for Opus Clips and for many of the copycats of Open Clips, you're going to want to have multiple variations created, and then you pick the one that you want, and it's going to be a lot easier than trying to micro -edit this way, okay? All right, let's go on to the next.
Money Printer Turbo. I have done this GitHub repo show where I looked at the top repos on GitHub. Top software on GitHub every week.
And this freaking thing kept showing up and I kept making fun of it and kept discovering how amazing it was every single week. You can actually see me say, this is so stupid. Why is it called Money Printer Pro?
It looks like Get Rich Quick. But what it does is it doesn't just replace NVIDIA. It actually, well, let me talk about the comparison and I'll get into what this does.
NVIDIA, hugely popular AI video maker. Now, Money Printer Pro is so much more than that. The problem with that is the credits do not last two short videos before you top off.
And this is an issue with video in general and audio in general. You need a lot of, not always, but you often, if you're creating something new, you need a lot of variations of it and a lot of edits and adjustments before you get to it, which can burn through a lot of tokens. I say not all is if you take a bunch of videos and you give it to, say, ChatGPT.
and you say edit it together, you're going to get a decent first video if you give it a lot of clarity. It's when you start to make things up that they go through these weird versions that you're going to have to get through before you get to what you want. Anyway, that's partially why it costs a lot of money in video.
I'm kind of hesitating on this because I feel like most of you don't even know or care about it in video. What you want to know is why is this thing any good. So let's talk about why it's very good.
It turns one topic into a finished short video. And there's a developer who's been working on it since March 2024, so it's not a brand new piece of software. What I like about it is it doesn't just use AI models to create new video for you.
It will also use all this free video that's been put out on the internet. We're talking royalty -free videos to piece them together and create a video for you. I'm going to show it to you in the really junky first version that we created.
I'm a little embarrassed by it, but it'll give you a sense of what that looks like. Okay, so. What you're going to do is type in a topic, and you're going to get a finished video back.
This is the form right here that you see on your screen that you are going to interact with. It's very easy to use, very clear and sensible. You give it the subject.
You tell it what type of video you want. Do you want to find stock photography, stock video, or do you want to have AI models created for you? Do you want a combination of the two?
Do you want to use some voice from another model? You put it together, and it does it. That's the goal behind this.
You can render it in batches, so you can just leave it and have it go while you're doing something else. You can use Microsoft's free Edge Voices with no account to set up. You can pull up stock footage from Pexels, from Pixel Bay, from this site that I actually don't know, but I know some of you use.
Okay, here's a couple of things worth noticing, and that is that you're going to still need to pay for your AI in this, but if you have a Cloud subscription, if you have OpenAI, if you have others, you're going to be able to use it there. Okay, let's go. Let's take a look and show you what we did.
This is horrible, horrible, horrible what we did. But you can still see two commands. Install Money Printer Turbo GitHub.
Here's a URL on this computer. And then we say use Money Printer Turbo to make this 19 by 6, 16 by 9 video with this script. Sitting down to watch Andrew's video on YouTube using free stock clips.
An Edge TTT voice, so really the free stuff, so we're not looking at anything that's amazing here, and burned -in subtitles. Again, I didn't really, this is not me, this is my agent, Robbie, didn't put in enough effort, but you can see the simplicity of it, and here's why I say this looks kind of bad. Sitting down to watch Andrew's video on YouTube.
See, like the stock photography that they found is a person who looks a little bit bored, so he's not looking like he's excited to watch me. God knows you should be hopped up to watch me, right? Anyway, you get a sense of how easy this is to use.
Let's move on. And this is if your agent uses it. There is a form if you choose to use it yourself.
Okay, next. OBS Studio replaces Loom. And look at this.
77 ,000 stars on GitHub. Many of you use it and know for other things. Let's talk about Loom.
Loom, hugely popular screen recording tool, right? It's one of those. It's the tool that lets you record your screen and then put your video in a little circle so that you can talk about what's on your screen.
It's incredibly popular. But free users are now told that they're being pushed into paid seats. Atlassian, since they bought them, has actually been starting to add Atlassian logins, add more pricing, reduce the free plan.
If you're on the free plan and then you want to go to paid, you're going to have to pay, obviously, but then you're capped on how many videos and you have to. Pay more to get more. And I think that one of the most annoying parts about it is when you're sending a loom to somebody, you're basically sending them an advertisement to go sign up to loom itself because they're so big on telling your person that they need to sign up to loom so they could comment, so they could get what I'm talking about.
And the price does actually get up there. $18 a month is pretty typical for people, but if you're using this more than every once in a while, you're going to want to be in this business plan, which is $24 a month, and you're still going to be capped at that. All right.
Meanwhile, I didn't even think of OBS Studio. I was just going back and forth with my agent. I said, what's a good alternative that people can rely on?
And it goes, OBS Studio. And I said, OBS Studio, that's what you use to record your screen when you're doing a demo for people, when you're going live. I get it.
But does it really work for this? And it turns out, yeah, why not? Why doesn't it?
It's clearly a very beefy piece of software, so it's going to take a little bit of getting used to it, but it's going to do much more than just those loom replacements. So you're going to be able to record your screen and go live if that's what you want, all from the same app. You're going to capture your screen, a window, a camera.
This is the kind of thing I would have been a little scared of giving you in the past because there's so many features. But now you just use like ChatGPT's screen sharing and you tell it what you want it to do and it'll set it up for you. Or you just use it and you say, walk me through it.
Where do I click? What do I need to do? And it'll walk you through and explain it all.
Okay. Record your screen, record just a window, record your camera, record the audio. You're going to build scenes, which actually you're probably not going to need if all you want to do is replace Loom.
But if what you want is to have a scene with lots of different variations, you could have this scene with two people on the screen, or you and your web page that you're showing off on one view or another scene, which is you. You get what I'm talking about. You get to change all that.
You're going to get to do green screen and all those things. But start off obviously simple as a Loom replacement that could build up to do so much more. Okay, worth noticing, it records, and that is where it stops.
There is no upload. The nice thing that I do like about Loom is I just hit record, and then I get a URL at the end that I can give somebody. You're not going to get that with this, but if you're comfortable with that trade -off of having to put it on a Google Drive or a Dropbox or your own system and share a link that way, this is going to be really powerful and helpful.
Here's my agent on its computer. By the way, I don't even install software anymore. I saw some guy on YouTube.
It was Matthew Berman say, I don't install software anymore. I tell my agent to do it, and I go, well, that's ridiculous. Then I said, wait, I could ask my agents to do it too.
And so in this case, my agent has installed this on its computer. This is a Grokbot agent. On its computer it installed it.
It's got a Linux computer. And so you can see, there it is. And the moment I said, wait, why did you press stop recording when you started recording your screen for this demo?
It said, no, no, what you're seeing is me recording my whole screen. As soon as I started recording it, the screen went to stop recording. Anyway.
Does that make sense? Let me show you what it looks like when you're actually using it. Here we go.
So hit start recording, that button changed into stop recording, and now it's going to open up Chrome, and now you can see that Chrome is recording, and you can do your talk over it saying what it is and what's going on here. Interesting, right? Like for a second ago, you saw that?
You can actually see on the bottom the taskbar for it. it's computer there it goes and it went into my youtube channel um all right you get how this uh screen recording works obs your favorite creator has been using it to create all kinds of live videos now you can use it as a loom replacement to create yours okay this one what a nice find d script you could replace with rescript If you don't know what it is, let me just walk you through it.
Descript is a hugely popular video editing and podcast editor. We use it here all the time. You can see this is a video that I posted last week.
What I like about it is on the bottom, you can see that timeline that you know that I love. But up here, you can see the text, the transcript of what I said. Obviously, there are a bunch of typos.
That's not how you spell Grokbot. I'm okay with that. when i want to edit all i do is delete from this text and it gets deleted from the video hugely popular for a reason it's easy to use like that so i get it the problem is that they're now adding more and more features that are ai oriented which often you don't even want it then drains your what do they call it underlord pricing and they're adding things to try to push you where is that i don't even see it on here to push you to their ai and that increases the price for people And really, all you want is this little screen right here that lets you edit with text and have the output get changed.
You know, for people who want to edit a conversation, this is a beautiful piece of software. I love it. I'm not telling you not to use it.
But if you don't need it as much as we do, you just need an alternative, this is a really good one. Oh, shoot. There's a breakup in here.
Okay, let's go into this. How did that image break on me? Essentially, and I made...
There we go. I made such a... effort to capture this.
This is what it looks like. Can you really tell the difference between Descript and Rescript? No.
Everyone's copying every freaking paid app right now and making a simplified alternative version of it. That's what this is. Here is a conversation with Steve Jobs and you can see somebody just highlighted the phrase it was $31 ,000 and they could just cut and get rid of it.
There's also the correct feature which has come in handy so many times. Okay.
So you're going to delete a word from the transcript. Oh, here, this is a better version of it. You delete a word from the transcript and the video drops it.
It's just deleted. You drop a video, you drop an audio file, and it just transcribes it all and makes it easy for you to edit. I think this is fan -freaking -tastic.
If you have not played with software like this, you're really going to love it. When you're happy with this, you can export the video to Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, and finish it in those apps. So you don't need all the extra features here.
This is not where you can edit. Actually, for many people, this is going to be plenty of editing for you. But if you want to take it into something higher end, you got that.
It ships with a system that will turn every video, every podcast into a transcript. You can then delete. I feel like I'm repeating myself with this.
Okay, I'm talking too much. Worth noticing. There is no color, no multitrack, no music bed.
Good. Congratulations. You don't want it here.
What you want is to just find the words that don't belong there, cut them out, and tighten up your video. That's all that matters here. I've got a little video for you of my agent using it.
Here's what it looks like once it's installed.
Then we dropped my old interview into the timeline. Look at it. Oh, sped up eight times because we didn't want you to have to wait for the transcript to come through.
I'm still getting a little bit antsy here, but there it is. Is this mine video or is this a video that we got off of GitHub? I forget.
I forget. And there it is. Wait, let me just show you this.
You can now see that you could edit it and you can see the transcript. You can cut the transcript any way you want like that. We highlighted.
You delete it and then you can export the video. You can export the transcript. It's just fantastic.
I think for many people, they're just going to want to export the transcript at times. I know I do that all the time. I get a video in there and I just want the transcript.
I want to cut out a few things. Okay. You get what I'm talking about here?
Has this been helpful for you? If it has, let me know in the comments. I'd love to know it.
My goal is to get to 100 ,000 views. I know it's kind of selfish of me to ask you to please subscribe, but I would love it if you subscribe. I'm putting a lot of effort into this, and I hope you enjoy it.
Let me know in the comments what you think. And if you like this, I have more subscriptions for you to cancel with AI. You don't have to cancel all your subscriptions, by the way.
If this just helped you discover a new piece of software, great. If it helps you cancel one subscription, great. Don't feel guilty if you have other subscriptions.
I'm just trying to help you. reduce your costs and level up your game. And the beauty of all these is you can level it up by telling Claude, by telling your coding agent, improve this and make it my own.
So if you like this, I've got more videos for you right here and I'll see you. I'm sorry, not more videos. I've got more subscriptions you can cancel right here and I'll see you in that video.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Seven paid creator tools, seven free replacements, and one running joke: the host never installs anything himself anymore. His agent does it from a GitHub link, and he reports what works and what breaks.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:18model
Replace, Install, Trade-off
Name the paid tool and its pain
Have the agent install the free repo from a GitHub URL
State the limitation before recommending it
Every segment follows the same pattern: what the paid tool costs and why people complain, a demo of an agent installing the open-source alternative, then a 'worth noticing' downside.
Steal forany software comparison
08:00concept
Agent writes, human scrubs
Let the agent produce the edit, but keep an editor with a visible timeline so small adjustments take seconds instead of another prompt.
Steal forany AI-assisted video editing
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
27:24subscribe
“Let me know in the comments what you think. And if you like this, I have more subscriptions for you to cancel right here.”
Soft ask tied to a visible 100,000 subscriber goal, with a second subscribe ask mid-video and a next-video pointer at the end.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
Two agent obsessives react to the best Claude Duet demos on YouTube and score each one: task view and Claude integration win, missing computer access and single-player design lose.
Twelve new AI releases in one sitting, from an AI agent that builds launch videos to a popup tool already clearing real revenue, broken down tool by tool.
Two hosts react to eleven creators' real GrokBot setups, timing which automations are worth the tokens and which ones need a webhook instead of a timer.
Nine free, self-hosted GitHub tools that replace pricey SaaS subscriptions, plus the exact consulting pitch to sell each swap to someone still paying for the alternative.
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