Self-hosted video production. Free while in beta.
Your channel needs three videos a week. You have a full-time job.
Not a shortage of ideas, and not a shortage of effort. A shortage of the eleven hours a week it takes to script, record, edit and upload them.
Free while it is in betaabout 20 minutes from topic to finished fileyou approve the script before anything is spent
And it stops twice, for you. Nothing runs until you have approved the script. Nothing publishes until you have watched the finished video.
Free while in beta. Framecast is under active development, and every account is reviewed by an operator before it can be used.
Type a topic. Get a finished video.
Framecast measures and improves the three things that decide whether a channel grows.
Your output
One topic in, a finished and published video out. Three a week without three evenings.
Your consistency
A daily schedule that runs whether or not you are at the keyboard, and reels cut out of every long video automatically.
Your cost per video
Every generation priced and recorded against the video that spent it, so you know the number rather than guessing it.
What it actually does, and what it costs
- Eight stages, every video
- Script, narration, footage, render, metadata, thumbnail, shorts, upload. Not a roadmap — the stages that run, in order, defined in one file.
- About $2 of generation for a five-minute video
- Priced per call and recorded against the video that spent it. The number is on the video's own page, not in a pricing table.
- It refuses more than it does
- No narration until you have approved the script. No upload until you have watched the cut. A render that loses a picture stops rather than publishing a hole.
Six stages. It stops twice, on purpose.
A run goes end to end on its own, but it is built to halt and wait for a person — once before it starts spending, once before it publishes.
You give it a topic
A topic, and the prompt template that shapes what gets written from it — tone, structure, length, how it opens. The template is yours to edit; the model writes inside it rather than around it.
An AI writes the script — and then stops
The result is a sourced, spoken-word script. Nothing downstream runs until you have read it and approved it, because everything downstream costs money.
Exampletopic Why the Antikythera mechanism still puzzles engineers
scriptIn 1901, sponge divers working a wreck off a Greek island hauled up a corroded lump of bronze. It took another seventy years, and an X-ray machine, before anyone accepted what it was.
ElevenLabs narrates it
The approved script is read back in the voice you picked. The timing of that narration becomes the timing of the video — every cut that follows is measured against it.
Footage is matched line by line
Each line of the script gets its own stock clip, so what is on screen follows what is being said instead of looping the same montage for nine minutes.
FFmpeg renders the cut
Captions burned into the frame, a music bed under the narration, sound effects, and Ken Burns motion so a still image is never a still image.
You watch it, then it publishes
Approve the finished video and it uploads to the connected YouTube channel with a generated title, description, tags and thumbnail. Don't approve it, and nothing leaves the machine.
What is actually in the box
Eleven things Framecast does today, described by what they do rather than by how good they are. It is under active development, so the list will grow — but nothing here is a promise about something that has not been built.
You are writing a {{style}} script about {{topic}}.
Open on a concrete image, never a definition.
Cite a source for every claim you make.
Prompt templates you own
The template that shapes every script is a document you write, version and edit, with your own variables in it. The model fills the template in; it does not get to rewrite it.
Sourced scripts
Claims come back with the citation attached, so checking one is reading a line rather than re-researching the topic.
ElevenLabs narration
The approved script is read back in the voice you picked, and the length of that read becomes the length of every shot after it.
Footage matched line by line
Every line gets its own stock clip chosen for that line, so the picture changes when the subject does instead of looping one montage for nine minutes.
Captions burned in
Drawn into the picture rather than shipped as a subtitle track, so they survive a re-upload and are still there on silent autoplay.
Music, effects and motion
FFmpeg lays a music bed under the narration, drops sound effects against it, and pushes a slow Ken Burns move across every clip so a still frame is never a still frame.
Two places it stops and waits for you
The script is yours to approve before a single paid stage runs, and the finished cut is yours to watch before anything reaches your channel. Neither gate can be skipped, and not approving is a complete answer.
Shorts from the same render
Pick a stretch of a video you have already finished and it is reframed to vertical and re-captioned from that same master.
Publishes with its metadata
The title, description, tags and thumbnail are written from the same script the video was, and go up to the connected channel with it.
Every generation costed
Each script, voice and image call is priced as it runs and totalled against the video it went into, so a video's cost is a number you can look up rather than a provider bill you reconcile later.
One machine, your keys
App, renderer and database run on a single server you control, driven by API keys you supply and that are encrypted before they are stored.
In every finished run
Twelve things, and you do two of them
- A script from your template
- Sources for its claims
- Your approval of that script
- ElevenLabs narration
- Footage matched per line
- Captions burned into frame
- A music bed and sound effects
- Ken Burns motion on every clip
- A 1920 × 1080 master
- Title, description, tags, thumbnail
- Your approval of the finished cut
- The upload to your channel
The two amber ones are yours: the run halts at each of them until you say so.
What a finished run leaves behind
One long video, the Shorts you choose to cut from it, and the listing that goes up with it — all from the same script.
A 16:9 video
Narration, matched footage, a music bed, sound effects, Ken Burns motion, and captions burned into the frame.
A vertical Short
Framecast can cut vertical Shorts out of a video it has already finished, reframed and re-captioned from the same render.
Why the Antikythera mechanism still puzzles engineers
The YouTube listing
Title, description, tags and thumbnail are generated with the video and travel with it to the channel.
Illustrations, not screenshots. The topic and copy above are an example.
And a room to watch it from
Automation you cannot see is just something going wrong quietly. Four screens carry the parts of a run you actually need in front of you.
Read the script before it spends
The draft arrives on the video's own page, with every earlier version kept beside it. Approving is a deliberate click, and it is the click that unlocks the paid stages.
Watch the run as it happens
Each stage reports in as it starts, finishes or fails, and the log streams into the page rather than making you reload it. When a render breaks you get the reason, not a red badge.
See what it cost, per video
Script, voice and image generations are priced as they run and totalled against the video they went into. Render times and failures are on the same page.
Connect a channel, or take it back
A YouTube channel is connected through Google's own consent screen and can be disconnected from the same page at any time, which deletes the stored tokens then and there.
What it costs
Framecast cannot charge you. There is no payment system in it — the section below is the whole truth about money, including the part where there is nothing to sell.
Beta
Available nowFree
Framecast is free to use while it is in beta. Create an account and an operator reviews it before it is activated.
- The whole pipeline: script, narration, footage, render, publish
- Shorts cut from any video you have finished
- Per-generation cost recorded against each video
- You supply the AI provider keys
Self-hosted
Available nowYour server
Framecast runs on one machine. Host it yourself and there is nobody to pay for the software — you pay your VPS and your API providers, directly.
- App, renderer and database on a single server
- Database reachable only from that machine
- Tokens and keys encrypted at rest
See the terms for how third-party costs are handled.
Paid plans
Not availableNone
Framecast has no payment system: no checkout, no subscription, no card on file, no invoice. There is nothing on this page you can buy, and no button here takes payment.
- No pricing tiers to compare
- No trial that converts into a charge
- If this ever changes, it will change here first
Nothing to do here — there is nothing to buy.
Questions worth asking first
Mostly about control, money and what leaves the machine.
Your channel, your keys, your machine.
Framecast is a private studio tool under active development, not a public service. Create an account and an operator will review it before it can be used.
Free while it is in betaabout 20 minutes from topic to finished fileyou approve the script before anything is spent
- One machine
- Framecast is self-hosted. The app, the renderer and the database all run on a single server, and that database accepts no connections from the internet.
- Your keys
- The AI providers are configured with keys you supply, and each generation's cost is recorded against the video it produced.
- Nothing posts itself
- A connected channel is only ever written to for a cut you approved. Framecast asks for no Google permission beyond reading that channel and uploading to it.