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

wassimgr 37 points 35 comments July 27, 2026
github.com · View on Hacker News

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

Discussion Highlights (12 comments)

jadamczyk

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

ZiiS

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.

swaminarayan

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

zeandcode

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

saulpw

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?

sunnybeetroot

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”

wassimgr

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

dgellow

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

KellyCriterion

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

saulpw

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.

Farrynet

4 hours and 20 commits with Cursor is wild for getting something like this off the ground. How much of that time was spent fighting with prompt context vs actually structuring the browser media APIs?

vitally3643

This is by far the least interesting/worst kind of project emerging lately. "I didn't want to pay trivial money for a product, so I paid nontrivial money to have an AI make a version that's worse in every way that matters" Who cares?

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