Rescript
🎬 Open source, transcript-based video/audio editor that lives in the browser.
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Aug 2026
Rescript deletes video the way you delete text. Drop in a recording and Whisper transcribes it on your own machine with word-level timestamps and speaker labels. Delete a sentence from the transcript and the footage is cut. That is Descript's defining trick, with no account and no subscription. Free desktop builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus a browser version.
Nothing to host. Transcription, speaker detection, and export all run in-process through transformers.js and ffmpeg.wasm, so your laptop is the whole stack. The Whisper model downloads once, then you can pull the network cable. Filler and silence removal are one click, and it exports a finished cut or a timeline for DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut, and AAF.
Solo creators cutting podcasts and talking-head video are the fit. Small teams can pass files around but not projects: no collaboration, no cloud, no screen recorder. Anyone needing a review workflow should stay on Descript or look at pireel/pireel.
Three catches. Rescript left MIT for the PolyForm Noncommercial license, so paid client work needs a separate deal with the author. The voice regeneration the marketing site leads with sits under Next on the project's own roadmap, not in the code. And the public repo is weeks old with one maintainer, so treat it as promising, not proven.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
source availableFree
Everything the project ships. Desktop builds for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows, and Linux (AppImage and .deb), plus a browser app. Whisper Base or Whisper Small transcription with word-level timestamps, speaker detection and renaming, one-click filler and silence removal, split and trim, a waveform timeline, and export to MP4/WebM up to 4K, M4A/MP3/WAV, TXT/MD transcripts, SRT/VTT/JSON subtitles, and NLE timelines for DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut, and AAF. No account, no upload, no watermark, no media-hour cap.
Paid
There is no paid tier and no cloud service. The license is the gate, not a price. PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 permits personal, hobby, educational, nonprofit, and government use only. Commercial use, including client work and anything with an anticipated commercial application, requires a separate license from the author, and no price for that is published. Releases from before the relicense stay MIT for those versions only.
Self-Hosted Costs
Zero infrastructure. The cost is hardware and time: a one-time model download, a Chromium-based browser or the Electron desktop app, and local CPU or GPU for the export re-encode. WebGPU is used when available with a WASM fallback, so an older machine still works, just slower. Anonymous telemetry and Sentry crash reporting are on by default and can be turned off permanently under Settings, Privacy.
When to Pay
You cannot pay, and if the video makes money you cannot legally use it. That is the whole calculus. Descript's free plan caps you at 1 hour of media per month with watermarked exports. Hobbyist is $16/month billed annually ($24 month to month) for 10 media hours, Creator is $24/month annually ($35 monthly) for 30 hours, and Business is $50/month per person annually ($65 monthly) for 40 hours. If your editing is commercial, that subscription is the honest comparison. If it is personal, Rescript does the core job with no hour cap at all.
Free with no media-hour cap, but the noncommercial license means anyone billing for the edit needs a separate deal with the author.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; download the desktop build and start cutting, as long as the video is not commercial
- Small team
- free for internal and personal work, but there is no shared project or review flow
- Medium team
- skip; the noncommercial license and the missing collaboration layer both bite
- Large team
- skip; no SSO, no shared workspace, and no published commercial license to buy
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