Recorded video is write-only.
Four ways your recorder works against you.
vidspawn exists because all four problems have the same fix: keep the videos where they were made.
Record it once. Find it forever.
Four steps, and every one of them runs on your machine until you decide otherwise.
What was said, who said it, and the moment it happened
Storage is the easy part. vidspawn turns each recording into data: a transcript on your machine, speakers you've named, chapters and tasks, and an index that lands a search on the exact moment.
"Who did I discuss the rollout with?" is a search, not a rewatch.
Yours, all the way down
Every piece of the pipeline runs on something you own: your Mac, your CLI, your keys, your cloud. Nothing in the middle belongs to us.
You only ever share an intent.
Bring your old recordings home.
Paste a YouTube, Loom or Vimeo link and vidspawn pulls it into your library: transcript from the source captions when they exist, whisper when they don't, then the same chapters, tasks and search as any recording.
Runs on yt-dlp, installed separately (brew install yt-dlp).
The part of your gold mine that lives somewhere else? Bring it home.
There's no upload to fail.
vidspawn writes your recording straight to your disk while you record. No streaming to a server, no processing queue between you and your file, no "we'll email you when it's ready". A dropped connection can't kill a take: there's no connection involved. Stop recording and the file is already there, playable, transcribed on your own machine.
The recording you finished is the recording you have. Every time.
The bug report that carries its own evidence.
Record the Chrome window while you reproduce the bug. vidspawn captures the console logs, page errors and network requests firing inside it, timestamped against the video. Open the Dev tab, click a log line, and the video jumps to the moment it happened. Your agent can pull the same telemetry over MCP.
If you know Jam, this is that workflow with the evidence landing in your local library next to the recording, not in a vendor cloud.
Watch what you did. Read what the page did. One recording.
More on DevTools captureBuilt for the way you work now, with agents in the loop.
vidspawn ships two MCP surfaces out of the box. Your AI tools can list, search and import recordings, read transcripts, start and stop captures, pull console logs and network requests from a recorded debugging session, even cut and render clips. 41 tools over local HTTP, 6 headless over stdio with the app closed.
Your agent"Record my screen while I reproduce this bug, then summarize what happened."
"Find the clip where the deploy failed and pull the console errors."
"Cut the first 30 seconds and render it for the changelog."
The agent comes to the dataOne line installs vidspawn and connects your agents.
One command downloads the signed, notarized app, moves it into your Applications, launches it, and registers vidspawn's MCP endpoint with the AI clients already on your Mac. Prefer to delegate? Tell your own agent to install vidspawn and it follows the runbook itself.
Your agent reads the install runbook at vidspawn.app/install.md and handles the download, the macOS permission hand-off, the connection and a verification pass. Tested end to end on a fresh Mac.
Claude Desktop lands as a one-click extension with the vidspawn icon. Clients it does not find are skipped, never forced.
Built to be read.
An app that records your screen and talks to AI agents should not be a black box. Open-sourcing vidspawn under AGPL-3.0 is on the roadmap: audit the capture path, the transcription, the exact moment bytes leave your machine. Spoiler: only when you click Share. No account with us, and one network call the app makes on its own: an update check, documented field by field on the privacy page.
When you do share, vidspawn sets up your own storage for you: one OAuth click deploys a tiny Worker into your Cloudflare account, or one pasted application key provisions a Backblaze B2 bucket. No middleman either way. Share pages are self-contained: player, transcript, download, expiry. If we disappear tomorrow, your library is files on your disk and your shares run in your account. That's the point. The same ethic runs through Settings: saving a cloud API key never moves your audio off-device by itself. Switching to cloud is its own explicit choice.
Your videos never touch our servers by default. The one exception is the optional hosted plan, and choosing it is exactly that: a choice.
macOS today. Your platform next.
vidspawn goes deep on one platform at a time: native ScreenCaptureKit capture is why the Mac build feels right. The core is Rust and Tauri 2, and Windows and Linux are planned. What people ask for genuinely decides the port order.
Signed and notarized, so it opens with no Gatekeeper override.
Download for macOSFree for individuals. All of it, forever.
Pay when your team joins.
- ✓ Capture, on-device transcription and diarization
- ✓ Hybrid search and the non-destructive editor
- ✓ Both MCP surfaces, all tools
- ✓ Unlimited shares from your own cloud
- ✓ No quotas, no watermarks, no account with us
- ✓ Multi-device sync coming soon, free
The free product is the whole product for one person.
- ✓ Everything in Individuals
- ✓ Shared team library, permissions, member management
- ✓ Runs in your company's own cloud account
- ✓ Recordings never touch a vendor
Not purchasable yet: the waitlist is updates only.
The full team product on infrastructure we run, with the AI layer included: hosted transcription, auto summaries and chapters, ask-your-library. The one plan where recordings touch our servers, by explicit choice. Planned, not yet built.
The Supporter License is from $29: pay by card once, or pay what you want on GitHub Sponsors, one-time or monthly. Your name in SUPPORTERS.md, and 40% off one team's first year of Teams when it ships.
No quotas. No watermarks. No personal-use-only clause.
Your cloud bill: $0 for individuals, about the price of two coffees a month for a heavy team. On Cloudflare, viewing is free at any volume: R2 has no egress fees.
A fair look at the alternatives
Kept scrupulously fair. If anything here goes stale, email us and we'll fix it.
| vidspawn | Loom | Cap | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recording survives a dropped connection | Yes, nothing uploads during capture | Cloud-dependent | Local recording, cloud shares |
| Where recordings live | Your disk and your own cloud | Their servers | Their cloud, or self-host |
| Free tier limits | None from us | 5 min · 720p | 5-min shareable links |
| Open source | AGPL-3.0, on the roadmap | No | Open source |
| Built-in agent (MCP) surface | 41 tools | No | No |
| Team recordings custody | Your company's account | Vendor | Vendor, or self-hosted |
Common questions
Is it really free? What's the catch?
The single-user product is free, permanently, and open-sourcing it under AGPL-3.0 is on the roadmap. We make money when teams use it together (shared libraries, permissions, member management) and later from a hosted plan with the AI layer included. Individuals are never the revenue model; they're the reason teams show up.
Why do I need my own cloud account to share?
Because the alternative is our server holding your videos. Sharing runs from storage you own: connect Cloudflare with one OAuth click and vidspawn deploys the share infrastructure into your account, or paste one Backblaze B2 application key and it provisions the bucket. Either way we never see a byte, and local recording needs no account at all.
What does the cloud side cost me?
Almost always $0. Shares expire by default, and both Cloudflare's and Backblaze's free tiers cover typical share volumes many times over. Cloudflare asks for a card on file to enable R2; Backblaze does not. A heavy team retaining hundreds of gigabytes pays a few dollars a month. On Cloudflare, viewing is always free: R2 has no egress fees.
Why AGPL and not MIT?
AGPL will keep vidspawn's code permanently open once the source is published: anyone who ships a modified version, including as a hosted service, must publish their changes. You'll be able to read, build and modify everything; nobody can take it proprietary.
Windows or Linux?
macOS first, and macOS only today: capture quality demanded going deep on one platform. The core is Rust and Tauri 2, so Windows and Linux are a matter of when, not if. Join the platform list on this page and raise your hand to beta-test: what people ask for genuinely decides the order.
What happens to my videos if vidspawn shuts down?
Nothing. Your library is ordinary files on your disk, your database is SQLite, and your shares run in your own cloud account. There is no server to shut down.
Does vidspawn collect telemetry?
Two things, and here they both are. The app makes an update check: the app version, the platform and processor it needs a build for, your macOS version, a random install id minted on your Mac at first launch, so we can count active installs without knowing who you are, and three yes-or-no bits for the last 7 days, whether an AI agent called a vidspawn MCP tool, whether a recording finished, and whether a clip was shared. The app also sends five anonymous usage counters: they are on by default, a notice at first launch tells you so before the first one is sent, and the Help us improve vidspawn toggle under Settings > General > Privacy turns them off. Both carry the same random install id and the app version, and nothing about your recordings. The server records the country the request came from, stores no IP address, and raw rows expire after 90 days. Every field of both is listed at vidspawn.app/privacy.
Can my AI agent really use this?
Yes, that's half the point. Add the local MCP endpoint to your agent and it can search recordings, read transcripts, control capture, and pull DevTools telemetry from recorded sessions. There's also a headless sidecar that works with the app closed.
How do I install vidspawn?
One line installs it: the installer at vidspawn.app/install.sh downloads the signed, notarized app, moves it into your Applications, launches it, and registers vidspawn with the AI clients on your Mac. The full guide, with the exact command and a manual DMG download, is at vidspawn.app/install. Or just tell your own agent to install vidspawn and it follows the runbook at vidspawn.app/install.md itself. Apple Silicon macOS, and no account.
Why does macOS ask for Screen Recording permission?
Screen Recording is a macOS privacy permission, and by design only you can grant it: no app, script or installer can flip it for you. vidspawn asks the first time you start a capture (and for the microphone the first time you record it). The grant takes effect once the app relaunches, so macOS offers Quit & Reopen; accept it and you are recording. vidspawn's own onboarding shows the same status with Open Settings and Relaunch buttons, so the app and the install page lead to the same place.