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Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

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Re: Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

#21
post #14

Posts like these now feel the equivalent of “I didn’t want to order Indian takeaway so I hired a chef to make me butter chicken”

But this guy will probably get hired because of this.

He works at Tesla already.

Re: Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

#23
post #19

I will never understand that thinking. You didn’t like that a service you need asks to be paid, so you paid an LLM to create a free competitor that you now advertise online. Do you not see the race to the bottom you’re contributing to? $24 doesn’t sound outrageous at all. Such a weird way to frame your project

The title is largely for attention-grabbing + relating the project to a product people know already; obviously this is not a replacement, the goal is to experiment with local/offline models and test the limits of the browser and showcase some of the new technologies like SharedArrayBuffer. I work at the limit of javascript performance and making projects like these is how I teach myself new browser APIs.

Re: Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

#24
post #11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you something like this will never monetarily "pay off."

I don't think they mean "monetarily". But once you have some reasonable parity you can implement your own features/workflow as you want them and not be reliant on Descript.

The context is i.r.t. the monthly cost and the cost of one's time, which has a monetary value, as well as the cost of tokens. So I think it's rightful to assume the topic is of a monetary pay off.

Re: Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

#25
Have you tried using this to actually edit anything? The local transcription is trash (slow, tons of repeated words, no speaker diarization, no option to upload a transcript or use ElevenLabs). I made a few edits to a sample episode I have, clicked on the upper left for a menu, it went to the front page and...I guess it lost the transcription and the edits with no way to get it back. Cool idea but it seems unusable at the moment, I'd say you have a lot more weekends of work to have something suitable for either Show HN or Product Hunt.

Re: Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

#27
post #19

I will never understand that thinking. You didn’t like that a service you need asks to be paid, so you paid an LLM to create a free competitor that you now advertise online. Do you not see the race to the bottom you’re contributing to? $24 doesn’t sound outrageous at all. Such a weird way to frame your project

The title is largely for attention-grabbing + relating the project to a product people know already; obviously this is not a replacement, the goal is to experiment with local/offline models and test the limits of the browser and showcase some of the new technologies like SharedArrayBuffer. I work at the limit of javascript performance and making projects like these is how I teach myself new browser APIs.

If it’s something you’ve done yourself, and not Claude generated, then kudos, that’s definitely the good way to learn

Re: Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

#28
This is by far the least interesting/worst kind of project emerging lately.

"I didn't want to pay trivial money for a product, so I paid nontrivial money to have an AI make a version that's worse in every way that matters"

Who cares?

Re: Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

#29

This is by far the least interesting/worst kind of project emerging lately. "I didn't want to pay trivial money for a product, so I paid nontrivial money to have an AI make a version that's worse in every way that matters" Who cares?

Please ignore the attention-grabbing title, the novelty here is that it runs fully in the browser with local/offline models that showcase some of the new browser technologies. This is not meant to be as replacement / fully-featured product, but rather a tech demo and an argument for what "personal software" can look like in the future.

Re: Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

#30

This is by far the least interesting/worst kind of project emerging lately. "I didn't want to pay trivial money for a product, so I paid nontrivial money to have an AI make a version that's worse in every way that matters" Who cares?

But they own this version instead of renting it. And it’s been released for free to the world.

That’s a way that the “worse” version is better to some people.

Also, assuming this person used $200/month subscription to some robot, and they used 5 days of of their quota, the money comes out about even after the first month or two, no?

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