It has a free Starter plan with 30 minutes of AI analysis a month (the page also mentions 15 minutes in one place) as of 2026-10-18. Paid plans start at $9.90 a month.

What does Reelsaw cost for 50 hours a month?

Nothing in software. Fully local it costs electricity and time; with cloud transcription you pay that vendor's per-minute price directly, with no Reelsaw markup.

Reelsaw vs 2short.ai

2short.ai alternative with no hours-per-month meter

2short.ai is one of the cheaper hosted clippers: it meters the minutes of video it analyses and charges by the hour bucket. Reelsaw removes the meter by running on your hardware, so the comparison is mostly about convenience versus control.

Pricing checked 2026-10-18 on each vendor's public page. Vendors change plans without notice; verify before you buy.

What 2short.ai costs

A free Starter plan and three paid tiers measured in hours of AI analysis per month.

2short.ai plans
Plan	Price	What it includes
Starter	Free	30 minutes of AI video analysis a month (one section of the page says 15), view and export generated clips
Lite	$9.90/mo	5 hours of analysis, 60 minutes of fast server-side exports, imports from Google Drive and public URLs, no ads
Pro	$19.90/mo	15 hours of analysis, unlimited fast server-side exports
Premium	$49.90/mo	50 hours of analysis, priority support, beta features

Yearly prices were not listed. The page says 'goodbye to watermarks' as a general feature without tying it to a plan.

What Reelsaw costs for the same job

The software is free under the AGPL-3.0 and there is no hosted plan to upsell you to. What you pay for is the machine it runs on and, only if you choose cloud models, the per-call price of those models.

Fully local: Ollama for the language model and Speaches (Whisper) for transcription. The installer picks a model by GPU memory or RAM (qwen2.5:14b with 24 GB of RAM or a 12 GB GPU, qwen2.5:7b from 12 GB, gemma3:4b below that), reuses one Ollama already has, and puts both on an NVIDIA GPU when there is one. Nothing leaves the box and there is no per-minute cost at all.

With cloud models: set OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Deepgram, AssemblyAI or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint as a provider:model string and you pay that vendor's metered price for transcription minutes and a few thousand tokens of selection per video. There is no Reelsaw margin on top.

2short.ai vs Reelsaw, feature by feature

2short.ai and Reelsaw compared
	Reelsaw	2short.ai
Runs fully local, no API keys	Yes, and it is the installer's default: Ollama for the language model, a local Whisper for transcription, on-device alignment and face detection. Nothing leaves the machine	No, the video is uploaded to the vendor
Model providers	Any, for each of the three models separately: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Vercel AI Gateway, Ollama, vLLM, LM Studio or any OpenAI-compatible server. No vendor is baked in; admins switch at runtime	2short's own models; not configurable
Entry price	$0. AGPL-3.0 software; you supply the machine and, if you want cloud models, the API keys	$9.90/mo (Lite, 5 hours of analysis)
Free tier	Everything, with no plan and no meter	Yes: 30 minutes of analysis a month
Watermark	Never	'Say goodbye to watermarks' as a general claim; not stated per plan
Open source	Yes, AGPL-3.0, pure TypeScript	No
Self-hostable	Yes: Docker Compose, one-command installer for macOS, Linux and Windows	No, cloud only
AI moment detection	Yes: map, pool, rank with pairwise comparison; any language model, optional separate judge model	Yes
Face-tracked 9:16 reframing	Yes: face, split, stack and fit layouts per segment; 1.2 MB UltraFace detector on the CPU	Yes
Word-level captions	Yes: karaoke highlight, AI-picked key words, boxed or outlined, drag positions on a live preview	Yes
Filler and false-start removal	Yes: jump cuts located by forced alignment, each one reviewable	Not stated on the pricing page
AI dubbing / translation	No	Not stated on the pricing page
Direct social publishing	No. Export zip with paste-ready text, a YouTube Data API body and a TikTok post body per clip	Not stated on the pricing page
Agent and API access	MCP server (Streamable HTTP, OAuth optional) and an operator CLI	Not stated on the pricing page
Usage cap	None	30 minutes, 5, 15 or 50 hours of analysis a month
Accounts and teams	Multi-user with admin approval, per-user quotas and usage	Not stated on the pricing page

What 2short.ai does better

Price for a hobbyist: $9.90 buys five hours of analysis with nothing to install.
A free tier that produces usable clips without setup.

Which one should you pick?

Pick 2short.ai if

You clip a couple of videos a month and want the cheapest hosted option.
You do not want to run or update anything.

Pick Reelsaw if

You process more than 50 hours a month, or in bursts (a back catalogue) that a monthly bucket punishes.
You want the source to stay local.
You want MCP and CLI access, multi-user accounts and your own choice of models.

Common questions

Is 2short.ai free?: It has a free Starter plan with 30 minutes of AI analysis a month (the page also mentions 15 minutes in one place) as of 2026-10-18. Paid plans start at $9.90 a month.
What does Reelsaw cost for 50 hours a month?: Nothing in software. Fully local it costs electricity and time; with cloud transcription you pay that vendor's per-minute price directly, with no Reelsaw markup.

Related comparisons

Sources

Last updated 2026-10-18.