Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend
Details
- External ID
- 49065779
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- July 27, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 39
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8183990442054958
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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
Enrichment
- Theme
- AI video creation and editing tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- open-source alternative to descript
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The text-editor-based UI and tying timestamps to audio cuts is vibe-codeable, but running local speech recognition with per-word alignments and lossless video trimming requires non-trivial media pipeline orchestration.
What it would actually take: The stack typically uses Electron/Tauri or modern WebAssembly/WebCodecs paired with whisper.cpp (or ONNX Whisper runtime) for local word-level forced alignment and diarization. The hard part is maintaining tight AV sync, handling non-destructive timeline slicing, and generating clean cuts without re-encoding delays or audio popping using ffmpeg/libav. A builder needs solid understanding of media container formats, subtitle/transcript alignment data structures, and native audio/video processing pipelines.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Descript, Quickbooks, Apple SpeechAnalyzer
Concerns raised: Audio output has abrupt skips/artifacts when removing words, Single word deletions don't register properly, Multi-word deletions cut off first syllable of first word, Transcription accuracy issues/hallucinations, Not production-ready for professional use
Feature requests: macOS SpeechAnalyzer integration, Importing plain text transcripts with auto-sync, Desktop/Electron app, Splitting and reordering scenes
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 147 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #28 of 148 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 268 days after the earliest competitor.
- Weftly · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- DocBrief · ph · 2026-09-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Transcriptcut · ph · 2026-09-26 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- TrailerForge · ph · 2026-09-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- tondi · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Caption & Cut · ph · 2026-09-08 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Unmixr · ph · 2026-09-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- BossyScript · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.