Tools/0xsline/OpenChatCut

OpenChatCut

Open-source, local-first conversational AI video editor with a professional multi-track timeline, Agent Skills, MCP integration, and Remotion rendering.

1.8k ★emergingTypeScriptGNU Affero General Public License v3.0 →trending

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Replaces:CapCut Descript

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The Lens

By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.

Updated Sep 2026

OpenChatCut puts a conversational agent and a real multitrack timeline in the same window. Tell it what you want and it writes actual clips, transitions, captions and effects into the project, so you keep editing by hand afterward instead of accepting whatever a generator handed back. It is AGPL-3.0 and everything stays on your machine.

Desktop installers cover macOS, Windows and Linux, but they are early builds and the macOS packages are unsigned, so the operating system will fight you on first launch. Running from source needs Node 24. The timeline and manual editing work with zero cloud configured. Transcription and generation need your own provider keys.

Bring your own keys is the whole pricing story. The commercial ChatCut sells credits starting at $25 a month for 100 of them, and credits are what buy generation time. OpenChatCut charges nothing and sends you to the provider at cost. Solo creators and small teams come out ahead.

The catch is the license. AGPL-3.0 means wrapping this in a hosted service obligates you to hand users the source. For editing on your own desktop, irrelevant. For anyone planning to build a product on top of it, decisive.

Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid

fully free

Free tier: The whole editor. Multitrack timeline, transitions, effects, LUTs, zooms and keyframes, word-level transcription with text-based cuts, motion graphics and WebGL effects, and exports to MP4, audio, captions, FCPXML and full project data. Local H.264 export uses VideoToolbox on macOS and NVENC on supported Windows hardware, falling back to software encoding. Nothing is gated behind a paid edition.

Self-hosted: This is the only way it runs. Install a desktop build from GitHub Releases (DMG for Apple Silicon and Intel, an x64 Windows installer, an x64 Linux AppImage) or run from source with Node 24. The macOS builds are unsigned and unnotarized, so expect a manual approval step. Projects and media live under your home directory by default, with optional Cloudflare R2 if you want remote storage.

Paid: Nothing goes to the project. You pay model providers directly for transcription, generation and agent calls, at whatever their API rates are. The built-in agent works with Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, Mistral, xAI and OpenRouter among others, or you can drive it from a Codex or Claude Code subscription you already hold through the MCP connection. Compare that against ChatCut's credit bundles at $25 a month for 100 credits and $45 a month for 200.

Free under AGPL-3.0. You pay model providers directly at cost instead of buying an editor's credit bundles.

What to do by team size

Solo: free
Small team: free
Medium team: free; budget setup time for unsigned builds and provider keys
Large team: Free, but there is no mobile app and no support contract; weigh against a commercial editor

Self-hosting ops:moderate

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