In development · v0.7.0 · not open to sign-ups yet

A video studio that runs on free allowances — including your own.

Pick a platform, a category and a genre. SynthCast writes the script, draws every scene, records the narration, finds the music, times the captions and assembles the MP4. One to one hundred and eighty minutes, with the free tier of two dozen AI services doing the work — and a fallback behind every one of them.

What it makes → Where it's up to

Windows, macOS and Linux · your keys never leave your machine · nothing to sign up for

One press of Generate

every step has a free provider, and a fallback behind it
01Script→ 02Scene pictures→ 03Narration→ 04Motion→ 05Music→ 06Word-timed captions→ 07MP4
Five kinds of video

Not five templates. Five different jobs.

Each one plans itself differently: how many scenes, how long they hold, whether a picture has to show a particular thing, and what happens when a provider runs out mid-render.

01

A story

Written scenes, pictures and narration. The pictures have to show what the line says, so a story would rather wait for a real illustrator than accept a shape in the right colour.

30 seconds to 60 minutes · can be cut as a short

02

Motivation & mood

Lines over music, where the genre picks the sound. The pictures are the atmosphere here, so it is happy to draw its own and never stops to wait.

30 seconds to 60 minutes · can be cut as a short

03

How-to

Real steps, in order. Every app, site or tool the script names is looked up in a free encyclopedia — and a name that can't be found is cut, along with the sentence that carried it.

30 seconds to 60 minutes · can be cut as a short

04

Research & data

Real numbers, animated as charts. The model writes the query; SynthCast runs it against Wikidata or the World Bank and charts what comes back. No figure is invented, and a bad query is sent back to be fixed rather than filled in.

1 to 60 minutes · charts, not stock footage

05

Long play

Hours of music over a handful of slowly drifting pictures — the kind of video people leave running. A few pictures are animated on a free GPU, then the loop is built once and the music laid over it without re-encoding.

5 minutes to 3 hours · built once, looped

How it works

The interesting part isn't the AI. It's what happens when it says no.

Free allowances run out, and they run out mid-render, forty minutes into something. Most of this app is about that evening.

A chain, not a provider

Every step — script, pictures, voice, motion, music — is a list of services tried in order. When one is out of credit it is set aside until the hour it comes back, and the next one answers. Two dozen free services are wired in across the five steps.

It waits rather than cheat

If every illustrator in the chain has run out, a story pauses, keeps the script and the narration it already has, and carries on by itself when the first allowance returns. It does not quietly swap in abstract shapes and call it finished.

It counts what a day holds

No image service publishes how much free allowance is left. So SynthCast counts what this machine actually got before each one ran out, and says it in videos: “about 143 more pictures today — roughly 1 × 1 hour, 2 × 30 min, 5 × 10 min.” You see that before you press Generate, not after.

It measures this machine

Render times, picture yield and GPU session figures are all learned from your own past runs rather than assumed. The estimate on the progress bar is what your computer really did last time, not a number someone typed into a config file.

What it costs

Free, and specific about why.

“Free” usually means a watermark and three videos a month. Here it means something duller and better: the app only ever asks services that have a free tier, and it is built to survive those tiers running out. Nothing is charged because nothing costs anything to answer.

Today — run it yourself

Your machine, your allowances

  • Free provider keys you paste in once, stored encrypted on your own disk
  • Or connect an account in a click — no key to copy anywhere
  • A keyless story writer, for getting started with nothing at all
  • No watermark, no resolution cap, no monthly count
  • Your videos never leave your computer
Later — the hosted version

The plan, written down

  • Bring your own keys: generous use, full quality, no watermark
  • Use SynthCast's keys: a small monthly quota, 720p, watermarked
  • Long play metered either way — hours of rendering is hours of someone's CPU
  • A cheap subscription for turning the watermark off, not for unlocking the product
Where it actually is

You can't sign up yet, and there's no form here pretending otherwise.

SynthCast works, and is used daily to make real videos. What's left before strangers can have accounts is mostly not code any more — so here is the list, rather than a waiting list.

Written, and checked by the app itself

SynthCast answers the question “am I ready for other people?” from its own settings, ten checks at a time, rather than from a document that drifts. Most of what that list used to complain about is now built:

  • ✓Done. Per-account ceilings — videos at once, videos a day, minutes, disk — enforced before a render is allowed to start.
  • ✓Done. A queue that counts turns rather than age, so three videos behind yours don't go three times before mine goes once. It survives a restart with your place intact.
  • ✓Done. Confirm your address, reset a forgotten password, change the address, sign out everywhere, take a copy of everything, and delete the account and every video it made.
  • ✓Done. Terms, privacy, refunds, acceptable use, cookies, and a page on how the videos are actually made — honest drafts describing this software, with consent recorded against the account.
  • ✓Done. Your provider keys encrypted per account, kept out of the export, and deleted with the account.

What's actually left is a place to live:

  • ·A public address, and a mail server behind it — both are a signup and a line in a config file, not a feature.
  • ·Somewhere to serve finished videos from that isn't a home broadband connection or a free CDN whose terms forbid it. Object storage, on its own domain.
  • ·A way to take money for the hosted tier, which is the only part that genuinely costs anyone anything.

Until that exists, the way to use SynthCast is to run it on your own machine. It is the same application, with nothing held back for a paid tier.

Run it yourself

Three commands and a browser tab.

There is no installer and no account. Python 3.10 or newer, Node 18 or newer, and ffmpeg — then a setup check that tells you exactly what is missing before you waste an evening on it. Keys go into the app itself rather than a config file, if you'd rather. 

# one-time setup
python -m venv synthcast
pip install -r requirements.txt
python check_setup.py      # says exactly what is missing, and what is optional

# every time
python run.py              # starts the API and the studio, opens the browser

The repository is private while the launch work above is in progress.