Captionly vs Submagic pricing: $648 vs $34 once

OneTimeSuite Blog · Published 2026-07-21

Submagic charges $18–39 a month to run Whisper and ffmpeg on your clips. Captionly is $34 once. Drop a video, run Whisper locally for word-level timestamps, pick a caption style, fix any misheard words inline, and burn a ready-to-post MP4 — 100% on your machine. Same pipeline, your hardware, zero subscription.

This is the full pricing breakdown: what Submagic actually costs over one, two and three years, what Captionly gives you for $34 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.

What Submagic actually costs you

At $18–39/mo, one Submagic subscription adds up to $216 every year — $648 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Captionly is $34 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.

Three years in, the gap is $614 — and every year after that adds another $216 to the subscription side of the ledger.

Captionly vs Submagic, feature by feature

Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:

What you get for $34, once

Local Whisper auto-captions with karaoke word-highlight styles and ffmpeg burn-in export. The highlights:

• 🎙 Local Whisper transcription — whisper.cpp with word-level timestamps; the engine and model download once on first run, then run fully offline.
• 🎤 Karaoke word-highlight captions — Real ASS timing tags per word for the TikTok and Reels look, rendered by ffmpeg exactly as previewed.
• 🎨 3 style presets — Karaoke Highlight, Bold Center and Classic Subtitle, plus font size, position and highlight color controls.
• ✏️ Inline editing with re-sync — Click a caption, fix the words, and timings redistribute proportionally across the cue with no re-transcribing.

Costs about one month of Submagic, then captions the rest of your clips for free.

Switching is 3 steps

1. Buy once on Whop. One payment of $34 gets you the signed Windows installer, or clone the MIT source and build it yourself for free.
2. Transcribe locally. Drop a video and run whisper.cpp on your machine for word-level timestamps, then fix any misheard words inline.
3. Burn and post. Pick a style, burn a ready-to-post MP4 with ffmpeg, or export SRT and ASS for elsewhere.

When paying Submagic is still the right call

Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Submagic's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying $18–39/mo for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.

If that's you, Captionly is $34, once. For the deeper dive, read the Captionly vs Submagic head-to-head.

Frequently asked questions

Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Captionly is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/video-clip-captioner-mvp. The $34 buys the signed Windows installer; building from source is free.

Does my footage get uploaded?
Never. Captionly runs Whisper and ffmpeg entirely on your machine — your footage never leaves it, with no accounts or telemetry.

Does it do everything Submagic does?
No. Submagic's AI b-roll, auto-zoom and template marketplace are real value if you use them. If what you use is transcribe, pretty word captions and export, Captionly does that pipeline locally for one month's price.

More on Submagic pricing

Captionly — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns