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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

Replacing a paid app means you set it up and keep it running: hosting, updates and backups can be on you. What you give up.

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 →
Sponsor slot · openFeatured alternative to Shade. A labeled card for one relevant tool.
Book this spot →

05The build prompt

Get the Build Kit for Shade

The complete build prompt, plus 11 step-by-step prompts from research to launch, a design system file, a page-by-page spec, the data model and a launch checklist.

Get the Build Kit · $9 →

One-time payment. Delivered on screen and by email.

06Free open-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.

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Prices change; confirm on the vendor's site before you decide.