Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend
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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
HN · launched Jul 27, 2026 · 39 upvotes (top 18%) · 0 views
Niche: video editing software · 283 launches, 32 in the last 7 days ▼ -22% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 283 launches in video editing software →
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 : 454 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #61 of 455 (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 0.57
- DoneCut · ph · 2026-10-11 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- DocBrief · ph · 2026-09-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Transcriptcut · ph · 2026-09-26 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- 7drop · ph · 2026-11-02 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Moggy · ph · 2026-10-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- TalkCut · ph · 2026-11-01 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- ShortTranscript · ph · 2026-10-02 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.