Pricing
Pay for the clips you cut.
A clip costs a small base charge plus transcription for the audio it had to read. Because transcripts are cached, only the first clip from a video pays that second part.
Planned pricing. Accounts and billing ship with v1 — every figure here is an estimate and will change before launch.
Free
$0.50
in signup credit
Enough to run the whole pipeline before you integrate anything.
- Clip by phrase or timestamp
- Upload or ingest from a URL
- Cached transcripts and clips
- Daily request cap
- Email verification required
Prepaid credits
Pay as you clip
base + transcription x audio minutes
The workhorse. Top up a balance, get a key, spend it per request.
- One API key, revocable
- Balance debited per request
- Transcription charged once per source video
- Top up by card
- Usage history per key
Agent / x402
No signup
priced per request, quoted up front
For agents that meet the API mid-task and have no account.
- No key, no onboarding
- Price quoted in the 402 response
- Pay in USDC, retry, done
- Same endpoints, same envelope
Cached clips are free
The same media and the same markers return the clip that already exists. You are not charged to re-encode something twice.
Transcription once per video
Cut thirty clips out of one interview and you pay for reading that audio a single time.
Quoted before it runs
Pricing has to be predictable enough to state up front, which is what makes an agent able to decide for itself whether to proceed.
Billing questions
What if the phrase appears more than once?
Pass an occurrence index to pick which one, or a rough timestamp to select the occurrence nearest it. The timestamp wins when you give both, which is usually what you want when you already know roughly where you are in the video.
What if the transcript gets a word slightly wrong?
Matching ignores case and punctuation, so most near-misses still resolve. When a word is genuinely mis-transcribed, fall back to a raw timestamp marker for that end of the clip — you can mix a phrase marker and a timestamp marker in the same request.
Can I still use raw timestamps?
Yes. A marker is either a phrase or a timestamp in seconds, and the two are interchangeable at either end of a clip.
What can I feed it?
Video or audio, either uploaded directly to a signed URL or fetched by the API from a source URL you provide.
How long do download links last?
A clip download URL is signed and valid for one hour. Ask for the clip again and you get a fresh URL — the clip itself is not re-encoded.
Do I pay twice for two clips of the same video?
No. Transcription is charged once per source video; later clips from it pay only the base cost. And two identical clip requests return the same cached clip rather than encoding it twice.
Is it available yet?
The clipping pipeline is built and running, but there is no way to sign up yet. Accounts, API keys and billing all land together with v1. Join the early-access list and we will email you the day it opens.
Will there be a CLI and an MCP server?
Both are planned. The API is the primary interface and everything else is a layer on it, so a CLI and an MCP server are thin wrappers rather than separate products.
Be first in when accounts open.
Accounts, API keys and billing all open together with v1. Tell us what you are building and we will email you the day it does.
One request
curl -X POST https://api.ottocut.com/clips \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"media_id":"med_abc123",
"start":{"type":"phrase","value":"the results are in"},
"end":{"type":"phrase","value":"back after the break"}}'