A few product decisions were taken on the founding evening, after a research pass over 22 competing tools.
Decided
- One-hour source cap on the free tier. Long sources cost the most to download and cut. An hour covers almost every clip anyone wants from a podcast or a stream, and it bounds the worker’s time per free job.
- Both orientations. Horizontal clips come out as they are. Vertical clips use a manual crop: a draggable 9:16 window over the frame. Automatic face tracking was considered and parked, since it is the first step toward the AI rule being bent.
- A waiting page. Clips are not instant. A “preparing your clip” page shows progress from the queue and turns into the download when the job finishes, rather than making the person keep a tab open and guess.
Open
- Posture. Three options are on the table for how the tool relates to the platforms it reads from, labelled A, B, and C in the research, with a hybrid recommended. The choice has legal weight and is the owner’s.
- Pricing. A proposal exists and has not been accepted. This site will record the outcome, not the numbers under discussion.
- The design direction, as above.
The research behind these decisions covered competitor pricing, platform terms, and payment-processor rules in detail. Those findings stay in the project’s private notes.