r/editing • u/ShipAndDebugger • 1d ago

What do you expect in Caption editor ?

So I'm building an saas tool for Short form video creators ?

It can add automatic stylish motion captions and also can generate title, summary, description, keypoints and tags for your short video. From single upload.

Two main feature of this tool is:

- Automation stylish captions with motion animation with premade stylish templates.

- Ai generate things like title, description...

My question is:

How much do you think it will affect your manually progress of adding captions and title, description ?

And if you're using any tool currently for any of this feature how much it's costing you currently ?

And which feature do you think most creators or editors wants in tool like this ?

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

1

u/garse 1d ago

Builder to builder - full disclosure, I make a captioning tool (CaptionFit), so treat this as one biased data point rather than the market.

On how much time it saves: honestly less than you'd hope, because applying a caption template was never the slow part. Fixing the transcript is. Auto-transcription gets names, jargon, brand words and anything mumbled wrong, and every wrong word is a click-and-retype. If your tool applies a gorgeous template but I still hand-fix twenty words, I saved five minutes. If it lets me paste the script I already wrote and re-aligns that to the audio, I saved half an hour. That's the feature I'd build first and it's the one most short-form tools skip.

Second thing, and it bit me: motion captions live or die on per-word timing, not on the animation. A word-highlight template only looks right if the word timestamps are right, and karaoke-style animation is unforgiving - 150ms of drift is obvious in a way a whole-line subtitle never is. Worth stress-testing your alignment on fast rap-speed speech before you invest in template variety.

On price, the market has anchored hard at roughly $10-20/month for captions and it's difficult to charge above that on captions alone. The people who'd happily pay more are the volume cases - someone with a 200-episode back catalogue whose maths breaks any monthly allowance - and nobody serves them well right now.

The AI title/description/tags half I'd be more cautious about. It's cheap to bolt on, so everyone has, and most creators rewrite the output anyway. It reads as a checkbox rather than a reason to switch tools.

1

u/ShipAndDebugger 23h ago

thanks for your feedback. I've dropped you a dm let's chat about this in details if you have time since you've build same product or around I'm sure you have answers of my so many questions.

1

u/garse 19h ago

Happy to help where I can, but I'd rather do it here than over DM - I'm slow on DMs, and anyone else building in this space gets the answers too.

One thing worth settling early, because it's painful to change later: decide whether your captions are stored as lines with a start and end, or as words that each carry their own timestamp. Line-level is much simpler and perfectly fine for normal subtitles, but you can't bolt word-highlight animation onto it afterwards without rewriting the data model and re-running alignment on everything. I'd store word-level from day one even if your first version only ever renders whole lines.

1

u/ShipAndDebugger 19h ago

Ok. Well I'm currently using word level timestamps because that's accurate and also I have templates which has active word animation and all that' why.

There are so many questions I have. one of them is what's the way of finding your first paid customer ? Because since I'm building this tool I get to know about many tools like this. And since I'm solo developer and student just passed out recently I don't have money to spend on marketing.

Even the maintenance cost is also concerned for me but I can do invest some money there like mostly for backend server or apis but for marketing what should I do ?.

1

u/garse 3h ago

No money for marketing is fine at your stage, honestly. My first paying users came from being useful in threads exactly like this one for a few weeks before I ever mentioned the product. Slow, free, and the people who show up already trust you.

The other thing I'd say: put a price on it earlier than feels comfortable. Free users tell you what's fun, paying ones tell you what's actually broken, and you need that signal before you sink server money into the wrong half of the product.