Shade shade.inc

Can AI replace Shade?

The search half is real and rebuildable. Extract keyframes with ffmpeg, embed them with CLIP, transcribe the audio with whisper, put the vectors in SQLite, and 'the drone shot over the bridge at golden hour' finds the clip on your own drives. The open-source stack for that is mature and the result is genuinely good. What does not survive the port is what Shade has grown into: cloud streaming so an editor opens full-res without waiting on a download, per-link permissions and guest access, review and approval, and a model pipeline that keeps improving without you retraining anything. Solo, on local storage, the DIY version wins outright. On a team, you are rebuilding a platform and calling it a script.

Verdict: Half-bot · AI gets you partway; the hard part stays hardBuild time: multi-day
Half-bot

01What it costs

$35/moGrowth, monthly per seat
$420per year at that price

Checked Aug 14, 2026 · source: shade.inc.

PlanMonthlyBilled yearlyWhat you get
Growth$35$29.75/mo1 workspace; up to 15 paid seats; 150 guests; 500 GB active storage/seat
Enterprise——Unlimited workspaces and seats; 250 guests; 1 TB active storage/seat; 1 TB bring-your-own S3 storage/seat

Hidden costs: Growth is capped at one workspace and 15 paid seats; storage expansion and enterprise bring-your-own-storage workflows require a higher plan or add-on.

02Could AI build it for you?

The core job: Walk my drives, pull keyframes and transcripts, embed both with CLIP and whisper into a local vector index, then search the whole library in plain English.

What a working version needs:

  • ffmpeg
  • a CLIP model via transformers.js or Python
  • whisper.cpp
  • sqlite-vec or another local vector store
  • a GPU, or patience measured in nights

Semantic search over your own footage is the strongest DIY case in post right now · the collaboration wrapper is what you are actually renting.

03What you'd give up

  • cloud streaming of full-res files without downloading them first
  • guest links with per-link permissions and roles
  • built-in review, approval, and commenting
  • face recognition and shot-type tagging that improves without your involvement
  • team sync, so everyone searches the same index
  • the NLE plugins and Slack integration

They pay because the search only matters if the whole team gets it. A local index that only lives on the editor's machine solves the editor's problem and nobody else's, and the person who most needs to find the clip is usually the one furthest from the storage. Shade sells the index plus the delivery of what the index found, and the second half is the expensive one.

04Free and cheaper alternatives

ResourceSpaceopen-source

Faces, sentence search and local transcripts in an old-school DAM; installation has not discovered joy.

resourcespace.com →

05The build prompt

Paste this into an AI coding tool (such as Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable or Replit) to build your own version.

prompt.txt
Build me a semantic search engine for my own footage to replace Shade. Requirements:

- A Python CLI plus a small FastAPI web UI on localhost. SQLite with sqlite-vec for
  the vectors and the metadata, one file at ~/FootageIndex/index.db.
- `index <folder>` walks the tree, and for every video ffmpeg pulls a keyframe every
  5 seconds plus one at each scene cut detected by the ffmpeg scene filter.
- Each keyframe is embedded with open_clip (ViT-B/32) and stored with its timestamp.
  Stills and photos get the same treatment as a single frame.
- Audio goes through whisper.cpp for a transcript with word timestamps, chunked into
  30-second windows and embedded with sentence-transformers for text search.
- The search box takes a plain sentence and searches image and transcript vectors
  together, returning ranked results as thumbnail, filename, and timecode. Clicking
  one opens the clip at that exact frame in a player.
- Indexing is incremental and resumable, keyed on file path plus mtime plus size, and
  prints a running count so an overnight run is checkable in the morning.
- Everything runs on my machine, models included · no accounts, no cloud, no
  telemetry, no API keys. Files are read only, never moved or renamed.
- Out of scope: face recognition, sharing links, review and comments, and team sync.
  Do not build auth or a server deployment, this is a single-user local tool.
- README: installing ffmpeg and whisper.cpp, first-run model downloads, an honest
  estimate of indexing hours per TB on CPU versus GPU, and how to reset the index.

06Open-source starting points

  • Immich: Self-hosted photo and video library with CLIP semantic search and face recognition already built in. The closest working proof the search half is solved.
  • PhotoPrism: Self-hosted AI-tagged media library with local indexing and search. Photo-first, but the same pattern.
Sponsor slot · openFeatured alternative to Shade. A labeled card for one relevant tool.
Book this spot →

App prices, verdicts, alternatives and build prompts are adapted from Can I Vibecode It? (MIT License, © 2026 Rob Hallam). Each price shows the date it was checked and its source. Prices change; confirm on the vendor's site before you decide.