Questions, mostly anticipated.
Quick answers about how ShipCut works, what you get, and what you don't.
What is ShipCut?
ShipCut is a SaaS that turns a product URL and a short prompt into a polished launch or update video, rendered as a 1080p MP4 with a public share link. No editor, no timeline, no footage to find.
How does it work?
You submit a URL, an optional repo URL, a short prompt and a duration. ShipCut reads your site (title, description, screenshot, headings), writes a multi-scene storyboard, and renders the video for you.
How long does a render take?
Around five times the video duration. A 15-second video takes about 75 seconds. You can close the tab and find the result in your dashboard when it's ready.
What's the difference between the Premium and Standard variants?
Standard picks scenes from our hand-crafted library and fills them with your text — fast, polished, consistent. Premium writes the scenes from scratch for your product, with bespoke layouts and motion — slower (about 5 to 9 minutes) but tailored. Free accounts get Standard. Starter gets both with 5 Premium credits / month, URL-based. Pro gets both with 10 Premium credits / month and unlocks free-form mode (prompt only, no URL).
How long can my videos be?
5 to 30 seconds on the Free plan, up to 60 seconds on Starter and Pro. The slider snaps to 5-second steps. Free defaults to 10s, which lands well for most product page videos.
What does it cost?
Free is 3 videos per month, no card required. Starter is 19 € per month for 15 Standard plus 5 Premium custom-generation videos, no watermark. Pro is 29 € per month for 25 Standard plus 10 Premium videos, with free-form mode unlocked (prompt only, no URL). Both paid plans run up to 60 seconds and are managed through the Stripe customer portal — cancel any time.
Are my videos public?
No. Renders are private by default — only you can see them in your dashboard. You can publish any video to get a public share URL, and revert it back to private any time. Public videos are deliberately kept out of the sitemap (direct-link only — no crawler indexing).
Can I download the MP4?
Yes — every render is a real 1920×1080 MP4 you can download from the video page, save locally, drop in a tweet, attach to an email or embed on your site.
Can I tweak a video after it's generated?
Yes. From the video page you can describe what to change in a short prompt — colors, scene order, scene durations, slot text, background music — and we re-render. Standard tweaks are free and unlimited; Premium tweaks cost 1 credit each (Starter and Pro). Tweaks are available within 30 days of the original submission. After that, the video stays watchable and shareable, but no new corrections can be applied — generate a new video to iterate further.
How do I delete a video?
Open the video page and click ‘Delete this video…’ at the bottom — you'll be asked to type the slug to confirm. Or, to wipe everything at once, go to Account → ‘Delete all my videos’. Deletion is immediate and permanent: the MP4, the poster, every correction, and the agent workspace are all removed from disk. Used credits are not refunded.
Does ShipCut work for non-launch videos?
Yes. The pipeline doesn't care if it's a launch, a feature update, a milestone, a changelog highlight, a tagline test or a quick demo — anything you can frame in a 5 to 60-second prompt works.
What kinds of products work best?
Anything with a real public landing page that describes what the product does. The clearer your site copy, the better the storyboard. Pages behind login won't work — give us the marketing page, not the product itself.
Can I remove the watermark?
Not on the Free plan — every render carries a small ‘shipcut.app’ watermark. Starter and Pro remove it.
What if the render fails?
Failed renders don't count against your monthly quota. You'll see the error in the dashboard and can retry — usually a transient glitch.
What languages do you support?
The product interface is in English. We're a French-built tool, so the team can help in French too — but the videos are generated in whatever language the URL and your prompt are in.
Do you store my data?
We store your email (for the magic-link sign-in), the URL and prompt you submitted, and the rendered MP4. We don't track you, we don't run analytics, and no third-party scripts are loaded on this site. See the Privacy page for the full list of sub-processors.
Where are the videos hosted?
On our own VPS at OVHcloud in France. The MP4s sit on a local filesystem, not on a third-party object store. No CDN re-encodes your file.
Can I delete my account?
Yes — drop a line to [email protected] from your account email and we'll wipe everything (your account row, your videos and their MP4s). If you're on a paid plan, cancel from the Stripe portal first, then send the delete email.
Known limitations
What ShipCut doesn't do yet, and why. We list these openly rather than hide them — the gaps are intentional choices for the beta, not bugs we're pretending don't exist. Most will be lifted as the product matures.
Why is generation slow, especially for Premium?
Premium renders take about 5 to 9 minutes today and Standard about 2 to 3 minutes. Our serving capacity during the public beta is modest — generation gets noticeably faster as we scale up the infrastructure behind it. No magic on the horizon, just more room to work.
Can I customise Standard videos more?
Today Standard picks scenes from a fixed library and lets you tweak text, accent, background and durations through the correction prompt. That's intentional for the public beta — narrow surface, predictable output. A graphical editor is on the roadmap (reorder scenes by drag, edit slot text directly, swap palettes inline, swap a template within the same family) and lots more controls will land on Standard over the next versions. The current version is the floor, not the ceiling.
Can I make videos longer than 60 seconds?
Not yet — the slider hard-caps at 60s on Starter and Pro, 30s on Free, 15s on Premium free-form. We plan to lift the cap to about 5 minutes once the render infrastructure can absorb it without queue times blowing up. During the beta the cap stays at 60s so every render finishes in a reasonable wall-clock.
Sometimes my render fails — what's going on?
ShipCut is in public beta and the generation pipeline still meets edge cases we haven't hit before: an unusual product URL, an oddly-worded prompt, an LLM output that strays past a constraint. When that happens you'll see the error in your dashboard and the render won't count against your quota. We fix the underlying cause as users surface them, so the same edge case won't bite twice. Email [email protected] if a specific URL keeps failing — that's the fastest way to get it patched.
Can I generate vertical or square videos for TikTok / Instagram / Reels?
Not yet — every render is 1920×1080 horizontal 16:9. Vertical (9:16) and square (1:1) formats are on the roadmap but require re-laying every template, so it's a bigger change than a simple resize. For now use the horizontal output and crop or letterbox it yourself if you need a social-vertical version.
Can I add a voiceover?
Not yet. Background music is available today — tick "add background music" when you create a video and we match a royalty-free track to its mood. Voiceover (text-to-speech) is still being considered but is further out: we want to be sure the voice quality is genuinely useful before adding it as a feature.
Why didn't the site ingest pick up my product details properly?
ShipCut reads static HTML from your URL — meta tags, headings, sitemap, pricing/docs/changelog pages when they exist. Sites that render entirely in JavaScript (React Router without SSR, single-page apps) only expose a near-empty HTML shell to the crawler, so we fall back to the home page alone. If your marketing page is server-side-rendered or pre-rendered (Next.js, Astro, plain HTML), ingest works much better. Same for Cloudflare bot-protected sites — we degrade gracefully but lose detail.
Can I use ShipCut via an API?
Not yet — generation runs through the web UI only. A public API is on the roadmap once the surface area stabilises. If you have a specific batch-generation or programmatic need, email [email protected] — early feedback shapes what the API looks like.
Didn't find your answer? See the pricing page or learn more about ShipCut.