Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

Posted by wassimgr 11 hours ago

Descript costs $24/mo, so I built this over a single weekend with Fable!

Introducing Rescript: edit videos by simply editing the transcript text. Drop in a video and it is transcribed locally with per-word timestamps and speaker labels. Delete words in the transcript and the corresponding clip is cut from the video.

Runs fully in the browser: Local, free, offline and open source.

→ Github https://github.com/wassgha/rescript

→ App https://wassgha.github.io/rescript

Comments

Comment by saulpw 13 minutes ago

Have you tried using this to actually edit anything? The local transcription is trash (slow, tons of repeated words, no speaker diarization, no option to upload a transcript or use ElevenLabs). I made a few edits to a sample episode I have, clicked on the upper left for a menu, it went to the front page and...I guess it lost the transcription and the edits with no way to get it back. Cool idea but it seems unusable at the moment, I'd say you have a lot more weekends of work to have something suitable for either Show HN or Product Hunt.

Comment by sunnybeetroot 1 hour ago

Posts like these now feel the equivalent of “I didn’t want to order Indian takeaway so I hired a chef to make me butter chicken”

Comment by petra 1 hour ago

But this guy will probably get hired because of this.

Comment by saulpw 46 minutes ago

He works at Tesla already.

Comment by wassimgr 1 hour ago

It took 4 hours and 20 commits :)

Comment by sunnybeetroot 1 hour ago

That would make a good butter chicken

Comment by dgellow 1 hour ago

I will never understand that thinking. You didn’t like that a service you need asks to be paid, so you paid an LLM to create a free competitor that you now advertise online. Do you not see the race to the bottom you’re contributing to? $24 doesn’t sound outrageous at all.

Such a weird way to frame your project

Comment by wassimgr 27 minutes ago

The title is largely for attention-grabbing + relating the project to a product people know already; obviously this is not a replacement, the goal is to experiment with local/offline models and test the limits of the browser and showcase some of the new technologies like SharedArrayBuffer. I work at the limit of javascript performance and making projects like these is how I teach myself new browser APIs.

Comment by isawczuk 52 minutes ago

It's was always a case to describe your idea in context already known to users. Examples Uber for X, or eBay for Y. I think it's a great way to learn to build alternatives for payed services. Look at cal.com

Comment by KellyCriterion 37 minutes ago

So you collect now 22,99 USD / month? :-D

Comment by zeandcode 2 hours ago

Interesting, i have the same goal except it's for daily productivity tool github.com/slaveofcode/goodwebtools

Comment by swaminarayan 3 hours ago

How does this perform on longer videos, especially on lower-end machines? Is the transcription and video processing entirely local in the browser?

Comment by ZiiS 3 hours ago

Whilst I love opensource; hitting with $24/mo saving when you invest 100x that much in your time is probably not the way to sell it.

Comment by ray_v 3 hours ago

Where it pays off is not when you reach parity with the built product compared to the vendored product - it's when you can continue to extend or customize the capabilities when the original vendor can not or will not support the features you can now build

Comment by ezekg 3 hours ago

I promise you something like this will never monetarily "pay off."

Comment by saulpw 1 hour ago

I don't think they mean "monetarily". But once you have some reasonable parity you can implement your own features/workflow as you want them and not be reliant on Descript.

Comment by ezekg 22 minutes ago

The context is i.r.t. the monthly cost and the cost of one's time, which has a monetary value, as well as the cost of tokens. So I think it's rightful to assume the topic is of a monetary pay off.

Comment by pajamasam 3 hours ago

From the commits, it looks like it only took OP about 4 hours with Cursor.

Comment by wassimgr 1 hour ago

^ this :)

Comment by jadamczyk 4 hours ago

The name has a collision with a programming language related to ocaml - ReScript, which evolved from ReasonML

Comment by wassimgr 1 hour ago

Now live on ProductHunt! Please support the launch :) https://www.producthunt.com/products/rescript-edit-videos-li...

Comment by saulpw 1 hour ago

I hate Descript, not because of the cost but because of their dark patterns. (I learned recently that their CEO is the former CEO of Groupon, which explains a lot.) So I'd love something like this. But I need to edit an audio-only podcast. Is there a reason that it only accepts video files?

Comment by darepublic 1 hour ago

I think you can use ffmpeg to turn your audio into a video file

Comment by zaydmulani 3 hours ago

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