Some software is worth renting. Some of it is a monthly fee for something small, and it keeps your work on someone else's servers. Three times now I have decided to build the small thing instead.
A screen recorder, because Loom wanted $15 to $20 a month
I record a lot of walkthroughs. Walkthru records the screen and the camera as two separate streams instead of painting them onto a canvas, which is what made my first attempt drop frames.
- The camera bubble is its own window, left out of the capture, and stays movable at playback.
- A real timeline editor: split, cut, restore, speed from 0.5× to 2×.
- Exports go through native ffmpeg with hardware encoding.
- Transcripts and subtitles run locally through Whisper.
No account, no upload, no subscription.
Voice typing, because my microphone should stay mine
FlowType came out of building voice notes for Daybook. Once I could talk instead of type there, I wanted it everywhere: Slack, a terminal, a client email. The tools that do that well send your microphone to someone's cloud.
Hold a key, speak, release, and the text lands in whatever window is focused. It transcribes locally on faster-whisper at roughly ten times realtime on Apple Silicon, and an optional pass fixes punctuation and filler words.
If a tool is small and I use it every day, I would rather own it than rent it.
A video drive, because Google Drive was slow and blind
The content team parked hundreds of gigabytes of trade-show footage in Google Drive. It was expensive, slow to play and impossible to search. Reelvault moved 448 GB onto Cloudflare R2.
- Camera masters will not play in a browser, so workers make 1080p proxies: 342 GB became 34 GB.
- Whisper transcribed 1,406 videos, so the team searches for what was said and jumps to the moment.
- When a video posts, its ManyChat automation is created on its own.
When to build instead of buy
My rule is simple. If the tool is small, I use it daily, and it holds work I would not want on someone else's servers, it is a candidate. If it is big, shared, or somebody's full-time job to maintain, I pay for it and move on.