OpenShortsVidyo.ai is now Quso: what changed, what it costs, and the open source alternative
OpenShorts is an open source AI clip generator you can run yourself for free, or use hosted from $12/month. Quso is a closed-source cloud product starting at $19/month billed yearly ($29 monthly).
Both find viral moments in long video and reframe them to 9:16 with face tracking. OpenShorts adds two-speaker, screencast and webcam-inset layouts and AI UGC video with lip-synced actors. Quso adds a content planner and analytics, which we do not have.
Pick Quso if you want zero setup and nothing else matters. Pick OpenShorts if you want to self-host for privacy, keep costs near zero, or change how the pipeline behaves.
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 Quso (formerly Vidyo.ai)?
Quso is the new name of Vidyo.ai. The rebrand went live in January 2025, vidyo.ai now answers with a permanent redirect to quso.ai, and logins, plans, credits and projects carried over unchanged. What did change is the pitch: Quso sells itself as an all-in-one suite for creating, editing, scheduling and analysing social content, with the AI clipper as one part of it.
Is OpenShorts a real alternative to Quso?
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 Quso cost?
Pricing checked 2026-10-05. Vendors change plans without notice; verify before you buy.
- Free: 75 credits a month (one credit is about one minute of video), 720p, data kept 7 days, no scheduling
- Lite: $29/month, or $19/month billed yearly: 100 credits (200 on yearly), 1080p, desktop editor
- Essential: $39/month, or $26/month billed yearly: 300 credits (600 on yearly), scheduling, filler and silence removal, content planner
- Growth: $49/month, or $33/month billed yearly: 600 credits (1,200 on yearly), brand kit, AI assistant, analytics
Quso bills credits, and a credit is roughly a minute of processed video, so a 60-minute podcast uses 60 of them whatever it yields. The yearly plans double the credits, which makes month-to-month billing about three times as expensive per minute.
What would you pay for your own usage?
Move the slider to the number of minutes of source video you clip in a month. Each bar is the cheapest published plan that covers it.
Cheapest published plan that covers that many minutes, per month. Prices checked 2026-10-05. Self-hosted needs Docker and your own Gemini key, whose free tier covers 1,500 requests a day.
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.
Quso vs OpenShorts, feature by feature
| Feature | OpenShorts | Quso |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $0 self-hosted · $0 hosted for 20 min/mo · $12/mo hosted without watermark | $19/month billed yearly ($29 monthly) |
| 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 | Not listed on its pricing page |
| AI UGC video with lip-synced actors | Yes, from $0.65/video | Not listed on its pricing page |
| Free AI YouTube thumbnail & title studio | Yes | Not listed on its pricing page |
| Usage cap | None when self-hosted · metered on Cloud | Metered in credits (~1 per minute of video) |
What Quso does better
A comparison that finds nothing good to say about the other tool is not worth reading, so here is where Quso genuinely wins:
- Scheduling, a content planner and analytics in the same app, which a pure clipper does not have
- A free plan that is larger than most in minutes
- A mature product: the Vidyo.ai clipper has been on the market since before most of this category existed
Where the two differ
- OpenShorts is MIT-licensed and self-hostable; Quso is a closed cloud service.
- OpenShorts is a clipper first: moment scoring, face-tracked reframing, two-speaker and screencast layouts, dubbing into 30+ languages. Quso spreads across scheduling and planning too.
- OpenShorts Cloud starts at $12/month billed monthly; Quso's cheapest paid plan is $29 month to month or $19/month on a yearly commitment.
- If you want one app that also plans and schedules your whole social calendar, Quso covers more ground than we do.
Which one should you pick?
- You want clipping, scheduling and analytics in one app
- You can commit to a yearly plan
- You want a content planner for your whole calendar
- Clipping quality and control are the job
- You want to pay monthly from $12, or $0 self-hosted
- You need two-speaker, screencast or webcam-inset layouts
Quso is the better pick if you want clipping, scheduling and analytics in one subscription. OpenShorts is the better pick if clipping quality and control are the job, or you want it free and self-hosted.
Common questions
- Is there a free alternative to Quso?
- 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. Quso starts at $19/month billed yearly ($29 monthly).
- Is there an open source alternative to Quso?
- OpenShorts is MIT-licensed and the full source is on GitHub at github.com/mutonby/openshorts. Quso 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 Quso 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.
- What happened to Vidyo.ai?
- It was renamed Quso.ai in January 2025. vidyo.ai redirects to quso.ai, and accounts, plans and credits carried over. Quso added social scheduling, a content planner with analytics and a brand kit around the original clipper.
- Is Vidyo.ai (Quso) free?
- Quso has a free plan with 75 credits a month (about 75 minutes of video), 720p exports and 7-day data retention. Paid plans start at $19/month billed yearly or $29 month to month. OpenShorts self-hosted is free with no cap and no watermark; OpenShorts Cloud clips your first video free up to 60 minutes, then 20 minutes a month.
Sources
- Quso pricing, checked 2026-10-05 on the vendor's public pricing page.
- OpenShorts pipeline details from the project source at github.com/mutonby/openshorts.