Auto captions went behind a paywall. Pay once and make them on your own computer.
Word-by-word highlight captions for Reels, Shorts and TikTok. Offline Captions transcribes on your laptop, so there are no uploads, no credits and no monthly bill.
Founding price. $39 after launch. One payment, no subscription.
Unlimited videos
No watermark
Videos never leave your computer
MP4 + SRT
Made with our engine
Demo
Same clip, four styles. Untouched engine output.
These clips came straight out of our caption engine with no hand edits: a 19-second public-domain NASA clip, transcribed offline and rendered in each style. Switch styles to see the difference.
Reveal: words appear as they're spoken, with a green highlight.
What the engine heard (English, NVIDIA Parakeet, offline):
"We talk to each other by establishing a radio link between the ISS and your school as we fly over your location. We won't have a lot of time to talk because we'll be cruising over the ground station at 17,500 miles an hour. That's 25 times the speed of sound. So we'll actually only have about nineorten minutes of good radio contact from the horizon to the horizon."
The three yellow words are ones the model flagged as unsure. They were right this time; the app asks you to glance at them instead of proofreading everything. Clips are muted here.
Review: jump from one yellow word to the next.Style and export: four presets, position, size, batch export.
Screenshots from a pre-release build of the desktop app; details may change before launch.
How it works
Three steps, a couple of minutes.
1
Drop in your videos
One clip or a whole folder. Everything stays on your computer.
2
Check the yellow words
It transcribes locally and marks any word it isn't sure about in yellow. Fix those, skip the rest.
3
Pick a style and export
Bold, clean, punch or reveal. You get the captioned MP4 at your video's own resolution, plus an .srt file.
Personal dictionary
Correct a name or brand word once and it's remembered for every video after.
Filler-word removal
Drops "um" and "uh" from your captions with one switch.
Batch export
Caption a week of clips in one go. No credits to count.
Animated word highlighting
Each word is timed to the audio, so the highlight moves with your voice.
Hinglish mode
Hindi-English speech written in Roman script, the way your audience types it. More
Works offline
No account needed to caption, no upload queue, nothing to stop working when the Wi-Fi does.
Made for
Solo creators who post short videos every week.
If you caption every video you post, a per-video credit or a monthly fee is a tax on consistency. That's who this is built for.
Built for you if
You post Reels, Shorts or TikToks 3 or more times a week, mostly talking to camera.
You edit on a Mac or Windows laptop, not only on your phone.
CapCut's 2026 change put auto captions behind a $19.99/month Pro plan, and you'd rather pay once.
Your footage is private until you post it: client sessions, unreleased launches, course material.
Typical people: coaches and consultants, educators, podcasters clipping their episodes, UGC creators.
Also built for
Hindi and Hinglish creators. Roman-script Hinglish captions, timed word by word, offline. See the Hinglish page →
Probably not for
Agencies that need shared cloud workspaces and seats.
Turning long videos into clips automatically (that's what OpusClip does).
Phone-only editing. This is a desktop app.
Use cases
What people caption with it
Coaches
Talking-head Reels, five a week
Batch the week's clips on Sunday, pick one style for all of them, export. Your name and programme names stay spelled right thanks to the dictionary.
Podcasters
A batch of episode clips
Cut 8–10 moments from an episode, drop the folder in, and caption them all in one run. Guests' names go in the dictionary once.
Educators
Course and tutorial videos
Burn captions into the promo Shorts and keep the .srt for the full lessons on your course platform or YouTube.
Client work
Footage that can't be uploaded
Unreleased product launches, NDA client footage, clinic or therapy promos: transcription never leaves your machine.
Hinglish
Hindi-English creators
"Usko gaali de do, complaint kar lo" comes out in Roman script, timed word by word, ready for Reels. Hinglish page
Two-language channels
English one day, Hinglish the next
The same four styles for both: English runs on Parakeet, Hinglish on its own mode. Hindi in Devanagari and more Indian languages are coming.
Compare
Offline Captions vs CapCut Pro, Submagic, AutoSubtitles and Descript
The others do far more than captions. If captions are the job, here's how price, limits and privacy line up. Read side by side: vs CapCut · vs Submagic.
Caption tools compared, checked October 2026
Feature
Offline Captions
CapCut Pro
Submagic
AutoSubtitles
Descript Hobbyist
Price
$39 once $29 founding pre-order
$19.99/mo or $179.99/yr
$12–$41/mo billed yearly, $19–$69 monthly
Free with watermark; Pro $9/mo
$16/mo billed yearly, $24 monthly
How you pay
One-time purchase
Subscription
Subscription + credits
Subscription
Subscription
Auto captions
Included
Pro only (not in free)
All plans
All plans
All plans ("dynamic captions")
How many videos
Unlimited
No cap listed; AI features use 1,200 AI points/month
15, 40 or 100 videos/month by plan
Not listed
10 media hours/month
Max video length
No cap
Not listed
2, 5 or 30 min by plan
30 min on Pro
Not listed
Where speech is transcribed
On your computer, offline
Not listed
Their servers (web app)
Audio sent to their AI service; video stays in browser
Descript's cloud
Custom word dictionary
Yes, learns from your fixes
Not listed
Business plan only
Not listed
Business plan only
Filler-word removal
Yes
Not listed
Pro and Business
Not listed
Yes
SRT export
Yes
Not listed
Not listed
Pro
Not listed
Export resolution
Your video's own resolution
Up to 8K
1080p; 2K Pro; 4K Business
720p free; Pro not listed
1080p (4K on Creator)
Swipe the table sideways to see every tool →
Checked October 2026 on each company's own pages: CapCut Standard vs Pro, CapCut pricing change, Submagic pricing, AutoSubtitles, Descript pricing. US-dollar list prices; your price can differ by country, platform, tax and promotion. "Not listed" means we couldn't find it on the vendor's public pages, not that it's missing. All names are trademarks of their owners; we're not affiliated with any of them.
Pricing
One price. Yours to keep.
Founding pre-order
$29 once
$39 after launch.
Unlimited videos, no credits
Fully offline transcription
No watermark
Mac and Windows
All four caption styles, dictionary, filler removal, batch
Cheapest way to pay for a year on each plan that includes auto captions.
Offline Captions
$29 once
AutoSubtitles Pro $9 × 12
$108
Submagic Starter $12 × 12, yearly
$144
CapCut Pro yearly plan
$179.99
Descript Hobbyist $16 × 12, yearly
$192
Year two costs the same again on every subscription. Submagic Starter also caps you at 15 videos a month and 2 minutes each; Submagic Pro is $276 a year. List prices checked October 2026, sources in the table above. At the $39 regular price the first bar would read $39.
Coming next · planned, not for sale yet
Shorts Studio: long video in, ready Shorts out
Turn a long video or podcast into ready Shorts on your own computer. We haven't built it yet. We'll build it if enough of you want it, so join the waitlist if you do.
Concept preview: Shorts Studio is in development. The silence spans, quotes and captions are real output from our engine on a public-domain NASA podcast. The clip picking and crop animation are mock-ups.
Clean Cut: removes silences, suggests filler words and drops retakes, and your captions stay in sync after every cut
Clip shortlist: 8–15 candidate clips snapped to sentence ends, and you pick the ones to keep
Speaker-aware vertical crop: follows whoever is talking and stacks two people for interviews
Your captions on top: the same styles and dictionary you already use
Offline on Windows and Mac, no credits, no uploads
Hinglish-native, using the same Roman-script engine as Offline Captions.
$79 once · planned
Captions included. Already own Offline Captions? Upgrade for $40. Planned prices, may change before launch.
Nothing to pay now. Ticking a box doesn't commit you to anything. We'll send one email when it's ready.
FAQ
Questions, answered straight
What is the best CapCut auto captions alternative that works offline?
If you want CapCut-style animated, word-by-word captions without a subscription or uploading your videos, Offline Captions is built for exactly that. It transcribes on your own Mac or Windows PC, works with no internet connection, and costs $39 once ($29 as a founding pre-order). CapCut Pro costs $19.99 a month or $179.99 a year and CapCut says its auto caption generator is exclusive to Pro (checked Oct 2026). CapCut is a full video editor, so if you need its effects and templates it can still be the better fit. Full comparison.
Is there a one-time-purchase caption app?
Yes. Offline Captions is a one-time purchase: $39 after launch, $29 for founding pre-orders. There is no subscription, no credits and no watermark, and there is no limit on how many videos you caption, because the work happens on your computer instead of a paid server.
How do I add Hinglish captions to a video?
Choose Hinglish mode, drop in your video and export. Offline Captions writes Hindi-English speech in Roman script, the way people type it (for example "Usko gaali de do, complaint kar lo"), with each word timed for the highlight animation. It runs offline on your computer. Words it could not time precisely are marked in yellow so you can check them. Hinglish details.
Do my videos get uploaded anywhere?
No. Transcription and rendering happen on your computer. Your video and audio never leave your machine, and the app works offline once it and its speech model are installed.
How accurate are the captions?
English uses NVIDIA's Parakeet speech model. On our own 28-clip benchmark it had a 7.6% word error rate, versus 9.6% for Whisper-small. We have not finished a head-to-head test against CapCut or Submagic, so we don't claim to beat them. Words the model is unsure of are highlighted in yellow and a personal dictionary remembers your names and brand words.
Which computers does it run on?
Mac and Windows. Exact minimum specs will be published before launch. Transcription runs on your own hardware, so newer computers finish faster.
Can I get an SRT subtitle file as well as the video?
Yes. Every export gives you the captioned MP4 with the animation burned in, plus a standard .srt file for YouTube, LinkedIn or your video editor.
Can it caption a batch of videos at once?
Yes. Drop in a folder of clips, pick your style, and it captions them one after another while you do something else. There is no per-video charge.
Which languages does it support?
English is the main focus and uses Parakeet. Hinglish has its own mode with Roman-script output. Hindi in Devanagari and other Indian languages are coming; we'll say which ones when they're ready.
What if it isn't for me?
You're covered by a -day money-back guarantee. Email us and we'll refund you.
What is Shorts Studio, and can I buy it now?
Not yet. Shorts Studio is a planned add-on that turns a long video or podcast into ready Shorts on your own computer: it cuts silences and retakes, shortlists 8–15 clips for you to pick from, crops to vertical around whoever is speaking, and keeps your captions in sync. The planned price is $79 once with captions included, or a $40 upgrade for Offline Captions owners. It isn't for sale and nothing ships today. Join the Shorts Studio waitlist and we'll email you once if we build it.
Stop renting your captions.
Lock in the founding price of $29. One payment, unlimited videos.
