Why TubeForge exists
Most AI video tools are cloud platforms: you pay a monthly subscription, then a per-minute or per-credit fee every time you export, and your raw footage and unreleased videos live on someone else’s servers. For a faceless creator whose edge is their ideas and their backlog, that’s the whole business sitting on infrastructure they don’t control — metered by a company whose margins depend on the meter.
We thought the model should be the other way around. The heavy, repetitive work — rendering, encoding, applying motion — is exactly the part a local machine does well and a cloud bills you for. So TubeForge keeps the rendering on your computer with bundled FFmpeg, and lets you bring your own AI keys for the small, occasional generation calls that genuinely need a provider. You pay wholesale, at cost, for what you actually use — and nothing for the rest.
The local-first mission
Local-first isn’t a marketing word here; it’s the architecture. Your scripts, scene lists, brand bibles, assets, and rendered videos are stored on your disk in a local database — not uploaded to us. The app sends no telemetry about what you make. The only outbound traffic is the traffic you choose: calls to the AI provider you picked (on your key), and the one-click publish to YouTube over OAuth. We can’t leak what we never collect.
That choice has real consequences we stand behind: no render queue, no per-export fee, and no vendor lock-in. If a cheaper or better model appears, you swap the key — not the whole tool.
Free to start, fair to scale
The desktop app is free to install and fully featured. You pay for the AI you use — a free tier every month, or a plan from $9/mo — each a simple credit allowance that powers every AI step. No API keys, no per-video fee, no cloud-render charge, and a weekly cap keeps spend predictable so a forgotten process can never run up a bill.
Local rendering on your own GPU is always freeand never touches a credit. Upgrade, downgrade or cancel any time — we’ll always be upfront about what changes before it changes.
Honest about the gaps
We try not to oversell. The installers are unsigned during the beta, so Windows SmartScreen and macOS Gatekeeper will warn you on first run — the install guidewalks through it. Linux isn’t packaged yet. And TubeForge is a tool to make a real creator faster, not a button that prints a monetizable channel — the work and the taste are still yours. You can read the full security and threat model and the guides for the unvarnished details.
Who’s behind it & how to reach us
TubeForge is built and maintained by a small independent team. We’re not a venture-funded platform chasing seat counts; the product is shaped by creators who use it. The best way to reach us, report a bug, or request a feature is a GitHub issue on our releases repo, where development and every release are public.