Captioning a video without creating an account
Updated
Most free caption tools require a signup for two reasons that have nothing to do with you: it stops one person using the free tier a thousand times, and it turns a visitor into a contactable address. A tool that runs the work on your own machine has no free tier to protect, so it has nothing to gate. The trade-off is real in the other direction too: no account means no sync, no project history and nothing to recover if you close the tab.
What the signup is actually for
The abuse reason is legitimate and worth saying first. If every minute you transcribe costs the service money, an anonymous free tier is an open tap, and an email address is the cheapest way to make a person countable.
The commercial reason sits on top of it. A visitor who leaves is gone; an address can be mailed next week. For a subscription product that list is often the most valuable thing the free tier produces, which is why the signup tends to arrive before you have seen the output rather than after.
Both reasons disappear when the work happens in your browser. There is no tap to leave running, so there is nothing an account would protect.
Free, versus a free trial
These get used as if they were the same word and they are opposites. A free tier is a smaller product you can keep using. A free trial is the whole product for a fortnight, usually with a card on file, and it is designed so that the moment it ends is the moment you are least willing to start again somewhere else.
The tell is the card. A tool that asks for payment details before it has shown you an export is not planning for you to stay free, and the clock it starts is the product. Neither is dishonest, but only one of them is still there next month.
No account means there is nothing to leak
The part of this that matters most is not convenience. An account is a record, and a record has a retention policy, a jurisdiction, an export process and a breach surface. For a recorded consultation or an internal meeting, the safest version of all of that is for it never to have existed.
What does get left on your device is worth naming, because a tool that claims to store nothing while quietly caching 80MB has told you something false. The speech model is downloaded once and kept in your browser's cache storage so the next visit does not fetch it again. Nothing else is persisted, the footer shows exactly what is there, and the button beside it deletes the lot.
What you give up by not having one
This is a genuine trade and the case for signing up somewhere else is not nothing. Working without an account means working in one session, on one machine, with no safety net:
- No sync. A transcript started on a laptop is not waiting on your phone
- No history. Close the tab and the cues are gone, so export the .srt as soon as the timings are worth keeping
- No collaboration. Nobody else can open the project and fix a line
- No support thread tied to your work, because there is no record of it to look up
- The model downloads again on a device that has not cached it, which is the one thing an account could not have helped with anyway