4K. Your machine.
As often as you like.
Export is where most free plans finally ask for money — a watermark, a resolution cap, a queue, or a minute counter. Here the export is not a product. It runs on the hardware you already own, and nobody is counting.
Nobody minds you editing.
The work is cheap to give away; the finished file is not. So that is where the tier appears — and you meet it at the worst possible moment, with the cut already made and somebody waiting for it.
- $0Per export, at any resolution
- No queueIt starts when you press it
- No watermarkOn the free plan, ever
The same silicon that plays video, encoding it.
On a Mac or a PC it is the dedicated media engine in your machine — the one your operating system uses for everything else — rather than a software encoder grinding through frames on your CPU. VideoToolbox on macOS, Media Foundation on Windows. Linux has no single equivalent every machine has, so it uses a software encoder there.
Measured at 1.3–1.8× realtime for 4K on Apple silicon. There is no upload before it and no download after it, so the wall-clock time from pressing Export to having the file is very nearly the render itself.
And because it never leaves, there is nothing to meter. Export the same cut nine times with nine different endings and the ninth costs exactly what the first did.
The renderer is handed a recipe, never a command
The part of the app that draws your timeline cannot name a file, a folder or a program. It describes the picture it wants; the desktop app decides what runs and where the output goes, and passes arguments as a list rather than as a line of shell. A bug in the editor can produce a bad video. It cannot run a command on your machine.
Every setting, on the free plan.
The shape follows your project, and the app shows what a 9:16 or 1:1 crop of the same edit would lose before you commit to it. The one thing that is not instant is the very first local export on a machine: the encoder is fetched then rather than shipped in the installer, so the download stays small for everyone who never needs it.
Some projects still go out to render.
The local renderer builds a filter graph on your machine, and there are things it cannot draw yet. When your project uses one, the app says which — by name, before it spends anything — and offers the cloud renderer instead.
- Text and titles
- Speed changes
- Picture-in-picture and overlays
- Extra video or audio layers
- Gaps between clips
- Flash transitions
This list only ever gets shorter. Each entry is a thing the graph will learn to express, and it is written next to the code that would have to handle it so the two cannot drift.
Export it again. Nothing happens.
No counter moves, no watermark appears, and no plan expires. It is your hardware.