CapCut Pro costs $10 to $20 a month.
Canva Pro costs $15 a month.
Adobe Premiere costs $23 a month. $276 a year.
Final Cut Pro costs $300. Mac only.
To cut videos and add text.
Two students from India built a free AI video editor that does it all in plain English.
You type "add captions to this clip" or "speed up the middle" or "make a 30-second promo with fast cuts."
You type. It edits.
It's called Kimu. Open source on GitHub.
Not a toy. A full multi-track editor with real-time preview, AI-powered editing, and fast export. Runs on your own machine with one docker command.
→ Multi-track timeline with snapping and layer control
→ AI assistant that reads your timeline and moves the clips
→ Real-time preview, no render wait
→ Smart media library with tag and sentiment search
→ Built on Gemini 2.5 Flash and Remotion under the hood
→ Cloud-synced projects across your own devices
→ Self-host with docker compose up
Here is the wildest part.
CapCut is owned by ByteDance. The same company that owns TikTok. Your footage, your client work, your brand content, sitting on ByteDance servers.
Adobe got hit with a $150 million settlement two months ago for hiding cancellation fees. The DOJ found Adobe buried a 50 percent early termination fee in fine print so customers could not escape the annual contract without paying hundreds of dollars.
Kimu runs on your machine. Your footage never leaves your laptop. No account. No subscription. No upload to someone else's server. No contract to escape from.
CapCut Pro: up to $240 a year.
Canva Pro: $180 a year.
Adobe Premiere: $276 a year.
Final Cut Pro: $300 one time, Mac only.
Kimu: $0. AI-powered. Self-hosted. Open source.
1,654 stars. 178 forks. AGPL-3 license. Built by Robin Roy and Sreecharan from India.
Honest flags: this is early. Active development. No mobile app yet. The AI assistant needs your own Gemini API key when you self-host. Templates and effect library are smaller than CapCut.
CapCut is free because you are the training data.
Kimu is free because two devs wanted a real tool.
(Link in the comments)
https://github.com/trykimu/videoeditor
No comments:
Post a Comment