Case study
I needed Loom.
So I built my own.
Vid is the screen recorder I use every day. I record, send a link, and see exactly who watched and how far they got. If you got a video from me, it played here.
Below is what it does, how it was built, and what it costs to run.
Three things I could not rent.
I send a lot of screen recordings. Most of what I needed already existed somewhere, just never in one tool and never on my terms.
Know who actually watched
Loom tells you a video got three views. I wanted to know that Alex opened it twice and got 82 percent of the way through, so I know who to follow up with and what they already saw.
End every video with an ask
The last thing a viewer sees should be a button, not a logo. On Vid the call to action stays hidden until someone has genuinely watched enough to care, then it slides in.
Own the thing outright
No seat pricing, no plan that changes next year, no video I cannot move. It runs on my own database and my own storage, and the recordings stay mine.
Record, send, and see who watched.
Everything here is running today. This page is served by the same application.
01Record
One take, camera and screen together
Screen and camera in one take
A round camera bubble sits on top of the screen recording and gets burned into the file. Microphone and tab audio are mixed in. Recordings run up to 20 minutes.
Edit without recording again
Trim the ends or cut a bad section out of the middle. The player skips the removed ranges on the fly, so nothing is re-encoded and the original file stays untouched.
A native Mac recorder
There is a desktop version too, so recording does not depend on a browser tab staying open.
02Send
The link is ready before you are
The link exists before you stop
The video uploads in 5 MiB parts while you are still talking, so the share link is ready to paste the second you hit stop. No processing wait, no progress bar to sit through.
Share pages that do a job
Every video gets its own headline, subheadline and call to action. The button stays hidden until the viewer has actually watched enough of the video, measured in real watch time so skipping ahead does not trigger it.
Transcripts, thumbnails, collections
Recordings get a searchable transcript and captions. Thumbnails can be generated instead of screenshotted. Related clips group onto a single shareable page.
03See who watched
Down to the person, not the pageview
Tracking down to the person
Add a name to the end of any link and the dashboard reports that person separately: how many times they opened it, how far they got, and when they last watched.
Testimonials, as a second product
The same recorder collects video testimonials from customers, then embeds them as a wall on any site with one script tag. That side of it is called Vouch.
One person, and a stack that costs almost nothing to run.
The first version went live on 3 July 2026. The recorder, the analytics, the share pages, the editor and the testimonial side are all custom. There is no third party video service in the stack, so there is no per seat bill and no ceiling on what it can do next.
Video is served straight from object storage through a custom domain, which means no egress fees no matter how many people watch. That is the difference between a tool you own and a tool you rent.
- Framework
- Next.js 16, React 19
- Styling
- Tailwind CSS 4
- Database and auth
- Supabase Postgres
- Video storage
- Cloudflare R2
- Automated tests
- 224 passing
- Built by
- One person, in Claude Code
I can build one for your business.
Vid is one of the tools I built for myself because renting it did not fit. I work the same way for other people: apps, funnels, automations and AI agents, live in days rather than quarters. Tell me what you keep paying for, or what you wish existed.
On a Vid video this is where the button appears, once someone has actually watched enough of it to care.