OpenShortsSendShort AI: plans, limits, and the open source alternative
SendShort is a short-form video suite from $19/month ($15 yearly), but clipping long videos starts on the $29/month plan. OpenShorts is open source: free when you run it yourself, or hosted from $12/month with clipping on every plan.
SendShort covers faceless videos, avatars and caption translation into 100+ languages. OpenShorts goes deeper on the clipping itself: moment scoring, face tracking, two-speaker and screencast layouts, dubbing into 30+ languages.
Pick SendShort for many formats in one tool. Pick OpenShorts to clip your own long recordings, self-host, or keep the cost down.
Your first video free up to 60 minutes, then 20 free minutes a month, no credit card. Or self-host it free under MIT.
What is SendShort (sendshort.ai)?
SendShort is a short-form video suite rather than a pure clipper. It cuts long videos into shorts, and also makes faceless videos from a text prompt, AI avatar videos, music videos and TikTok slideshows, with word-by-word captions, caption translation, AI voice-over, a scheduler for TikTok and YouTube, and an API.
Is OpenShorts a real alternative to SendShort?
Yes, with one honest caveat. OpenShorts covers the same core job: it takes a long video, finds the segments worth clipping, cuts them, reframes them to 9:16 and burns in subtitles. Where it goes further is the clipping itself: two speakers stacked when both are on camera, screen recordings kept readable over the presenter, and a webcam inset enlarged instead of cropped out. The caveat is that the free edition is self-hosted, which means Docker and a machine to run it on. If you want a hosted product with no setup, that is OpenShorts Cloud, and it is a paid service above 20 minutes a month.
Real OpenShorts output, not a mock-up. A two-person podcast: both speakers stacked in half-frames, captions on the seam where they cover nobody. Source: Turn the Tables with Dan and Shoshana Jordan, Heritage of Faith, CC BY.
What does SendShort cost?
Pricing checked 2026-10-05. Vendors change plans without notice; verify before you buy.
- Free: No free plan. 3 free videos at sign-up, refund within 24 hours of paying.
- Starter: $19/month, or $15/month billed yearly: 20 shorts a month up to 90 seconds, 1080p, no watermark. Long-video clipping is not included.
- Professional: $29/month, or $23/month billed yearly: 50 shorts a month up to 3 minutes, long-video clipping, avatars, auto-translate, AI hooks, B-roll, voice-over
- Business: $59/month, or $47/month billed yearly: unlimited shorts up to 10 minutes, 4K at 60 fps
The entry price is not the clipping price. Turning a long video into clips starts on the Professional plan at $29/month ($23 billed yearly); Starter is for shorts made from prompts and templates.
What does OpenShorts cost?
OpenShorts comes in two editions and they are priced very differently, so it is worth being precise. OpenShorts (self-hosted) is free and open source under the MIT licence: Free and open source under MIT. You run it with Docker on your own machine and bring your own API keys. No watermark, no usage cap, no subscription. What it costs you is hardware and time: on a typical CPU an 8-minute video takes 5 to 8 minutes to process. OpenShorts Cloud is the hosted service: The same software with the compute and API keys covered. An NVIDIA GPU clips that same 8-minute video in about 50 seconds. Free plan: the first video is clipped whole up to 60 minutes, then 20 minutes a month, with a watermark and no credit card. Paid plans start at $12/month for 100 minutes with no watermark, up to $59/month.
SendShort vs OpenShorts, feature by feature
| Feature | OpenShorts | SendShort |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $0 self-hosted · $0 hosted for 20 min/mo · $12/mo hosted without watermark | $19/month ($15 billed yearly) |
| Open source | Yes, MIT | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes, Docker Compose | No, cloud only |
| Source video stays on your machine | Yes when self-hosted | No |
| AI viral moment detection | Yes, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite | Yes |
| Face-tracked 9:16 reframing | Yes, MediaPipe + YOLOv8 | Yes |
| Word-level auto subtitles | Yes, faster-whisper | Yes |
| AI voice dubbing, 30+ languages | Yes, ElevenLabs | Caption translation and AI voice-over ($29 plan and up) |
| AI UGC video with lip-synced actors | Yes, from $0.65/video | AI avatar videos ($29 plan and up) |
| Free AI YouTube thumbnail & title studio | Yes | No |
| Usage cap | None when self-hosted · metered on Cloud | Metered in shorts per month |
What SendShort does better
A comparison that finds nothing good to say about the other tool is not worth reading, so here is where SendShort genuinely wins:
- Covers more formats than a clipper: faceless prompt-to-video, avatars, slideshows and music videos
- Captions and caption translation in 100+ languages, plus AI voice-over
- An API and an agent interface for Claude, ChatGPT and Grok
Where the two differ
- OpenShorts is MIT-licensed and self-hostable; SendShort is a closed cloud service.
- OpenShorts clips long videos on every plan, the free one included; SendShort starts long-video clipping at $29/month.
- OpenShorts reframes with face tracking plus two-speaker, screencast and webcam-inset layouts, which is the hard part of clipping a podcast or a stream.
- SendShort makes more kinds of short video than we do. If faceless or prompt-to-video content is the plan, it covers that and we do not.
Which one should you pick?
- You want faceless, avatar and prompt-to-video shorts too
- You want captions translated into 100+ languages
- One subscription for many formats matters more than depth
- The job is clipping your own long recordings
- You want clipping on every plan, the free one included
- You want to self-host or keep the cost near zero
SendShort is the better pick if you want one subscription for faceless videos, avatars and clips. OpenShorts is the better pick if the job is turning your own long recordings into clips, cheaply or self-hosted.
Common questions
- Is there a free alternative to SendShort?
- Yes. OpenShorts self-hosted is free and open source under MIT, with no watermark and no usage cap, and it runs on your own machine with Docker. OpenShorts Cloud also has a free plan: your first video clipped whole up to 60 minutes, then 20 minutes a month, with a watermark and no credit card. SendShort starts at $19/month ($15 billed yearly).
- Is there an open source alternative to SendShort?
- OpenShorts is MIT-licensed and the full source is on GitHub at github.com/mutonby/openshorts. SendShort is closed source. Being able to read the pipeline matters if you need to audit what happens to your video or change how the reframing behaves.
- Can I switch from SendShort without losing quality?
- The pipelines are comparable on the core job. OpenShorts transcribes with faster-whisper at word level, detects scenes with PySceneDetect, and scores moments with Google Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, then reframes with MediaPipe face tracking stabilised against jitter. The honest difference is caption styling, where the commercial tools generally ship more presets.
- Does OpenShorts put a watermark on clips?
- Self-hosted, never. On OpenShorts Cloud the free plan is watermarked; every paid plan from $12/month is not, and upgrading removes the mark from the clips you already made.
- Is SendShort free?
- There is no free plan: SendShort gives 3 free videos at sign-up and offers a refund within 24 hours of paying. Plans cost $19, $29 and $59 a month, or $15, $23 and $47 billed yearly, and clipping long videos starts on the $29 Professional plan. OpenShorts self-hosted is free; OpenShorts Cloud clips your first video free up to 60 minutes, then 20 minutes a month.
Sources
- SendShort pricing, checked 2026-10-05 on the vendor's public pricing page.
- OpenShorts pipeline details from the project source at github.com/mutonby/openshorts.