{
 "schema_version": "1.0",
 "id": "descript",
 "name": "Descript",
 "research_status": "researched",
 "vendor_domain": "descript.com",
 "category": "Operations & Workflow",
 "task": "AI video & voice content",
 "summary": "AI-powered video and podcast editor: edit media by editing the text transcript — cut, overdub and remove filler words like editing a doc — with screen recording, AI voice cloning and an AI assistant (Underlord) built in.",
 "best_for": "podcasters and video creators who want to edit by editing the transcript, cutting, overdubbing and stripping filler words as easily as editing a doc. It also suits teams who want those same edits triggered from code or from an AI assistant via Descript’s API and MCP connector rather than from the app",
 "skip_if": "you need frame-precise, effects-heavy editing (a traditional NLE fits better) or your monthly volume blows past the media-hour caps",
 "honest_knock": "It's per-editor pricing with two meters running underneath: media hours AND monthly AI credits. Heavy podcast or video volume burns through the caps fast, and the free tier watermarks 720p exports — model your real production hours before picking a tier. The API changes the arithmetic rather than escaping it. Their own API page states access is included for paying users at no additional cost, but the work it does draws from the same AI credits and media minutes — so automating a pipeline burns the caps faster, not slower. It also stops just short of the finish — the same page says direct media file exports are not supported yet, so the export step stays a manual one in the app. (read on their own API page, 2026-08-14)",
 "pricing": {
  "status": "public",
  "entry_price": "$16",
  "entry_price_terms": "per person a month billed annually, $24 billed monthly",
  "from_price_usd_month": 16.0,
  "plans": null,
  "plans_source": null,
  "notes": "(re-verified 2026-08-17 and again 2026-10-01) Free plan with 60 minutes a month and watermarked 720p exports. Paid, per person per month, annual against monthly: Hobbyist $16 / $24, Creator $24 / $35, Business $50 / $65, with annual billing saving up to 35%. Media hours and AI credits are capped per tier: roughly 10, 30 and 40 hours a month, and 400 to 1,500 credits. So the meter that matters is footage rather than seats — a weekly podcast can outgrow Hobbyist on hours long before it needs the features above it.",
  "verified_at": "2026-10-01",
  "source_url": null,
  "schema_offer": {
   "price": 24.0,
   "currency": "USD",
   "description": "Hobbyist, per person per month billed monthly — $16 is the annual rate; Creator $35 ($24 annual) and Business $65 ($50 annual), with media hours and AI credits capped per tier. Read on the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-10-01.",
   "page": "https://officesoftwaremarketplace.com/descript-review.html"
  },
  "source_quotes": null,
  "recent_change": null
 },
 "free_plan": true,
 "free_plan_evidence": "(re-verified 2026-08-17 and again 2026-10-01) Free plan with 60 minutes a month and watermarked 720p exports.",
 "cost_traps": [
  {
   "id": "usage_metered",
   "label": "Usage-metered",
   "evidence": "Media hours and AI credits are capped per tier: roughly 10, 30 and 40 hours a month, and 400 to 1,500 credits.",
   "verified_at": "2026-10-01",
   "source_url": null
  },
  {
   "id": "annual_lock",
   "label": "Annual commitment",
   "evidence": "Paid, per person per month, annual against monthly: Hobbyist $16 / $24, Creator $24 / $35, Business $50 / $65, with annual billing saving up to 35%.",
   "verified_at": "2026-10-01",
   "source_url": null
  }
 ],
 "compare_with": {
  "name": "Riverside or CapCut",
  "why": "Riverside wins on recording-quality-first workflows, CapCut on quick social edits; Descript wins on the text-based editing workflow itself"
 },
 "links": {
  "record": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/api/v1/products/descript.json",
  "review": "https://officesoftwaremarketplace.com/descript-review.html",
  "marketplace": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/marketplace/descript/",
  "vendor_site": "https://descript.com"
 },
 "purchase": {
  "seller": "the vendor",
  "how": "AIBuilder Marketplace does not sell this software. Sign up, start a trial or buy on the vendor's site.",
  "handoff_url": "https://get.descript.com/lt9i7t1hqzpb",
  "affiliate": true,
  "disclosure": "Where purchase.affiliate is true, purchase.handoff_url is an affiliate link: AIBuilder Marketplace may earn a commission at no extra cost to the buyer. Commission never changes what a record says, and products are not ranked by commission. Where it is false the link is the vendor's plain site."
 },
 "provenance": {
  "research": "hand-researched dossier, read on the vendor's own pages",
  "researched_since": "2026-07",
  "method": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/how-we-review/",
  "license": "CC BY 4.0. Credit 'AIBuilder Marketplace' with a link to https://aibuildermarketplace.com/atlas/.",
  "note": "A rebuild is not a new measurement: pricing.verified_at is the date that matters."
 },
 "cost": {
  "status": "available",
  "engine": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/agents/#cost",
  "rules": {
   "currency": "USD",
   "unit": "user",
   "axis": "users",
   "plans": [
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     "id": "free",
     "name": "Free",
     "model": "free",
     "evidence": "Free plan with 60 minutes a month and watermarked 720p exports"
    },
    {
     "id": "hobbyist",
     "name": "Hobbyist",
     "model": "per_unit",
     "annual_month": 16,
     "monthly": 24,
     "evidence": "Paid, per person per month, annual against monthly: Hobbyist $16 / $24"
    },
    {
     "id": "creator",
     "name": "Creator",
     "model": "per_unit",
     "annual_month": 24,
     "monthly": 35,
     "evidence": "Creator $24 / $35"
    },
    {
     "id": "business",
     "name": "Business",
     "model": "per_unit",
     "annual_month": 50,
     "monthly": 65,
     "evidence": "Business $50 / $65"
    }
   ],
   "not_computable": [
    "Media hours and AI credits are capped per tier (roughly 10, 30 and 40 hours a month, 400 to 1,500 credits), so footage volume can force a higher tier regardless of team size."
   ],
   "rules_verified_at": "2026-10-28"
  },
  "growth": {
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    ]
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    ],
    "switch_points": [],
    "conflicts": [],
    "unknowns": [
     "Media hours and AI credits are capped per tier (roughly 10, 30 and 40 hours a month, 400 to 1,500 credits), so footage volume can force a higher tier regardless of team size."
    ]
   }
  }
 },
 "unknowns": [
  "Plan-by-plan prices are not structured in this record yet; pricing.notes has the full text.",
  "Contract terms (cancellation, data export, data location, minimum seats) are not researched as separate fields; pricing.notes mentions them only where the vendor's pricing page does.",
  "Being verified: free trial and refund terms are not yet matched to a verbatim line on the vendor's own pages. Not matched does not mean there is none."
 ],
 "verification": {
  "price": "read",
  "free_trial": "being_verified",
  "refund": "being_verified"
 },
 "status_page": null,
 "task_evidence": {
  "structured_checks": [],
  "sessions": [
   {
    "source": "session",
    "product_name": "Descript",
    "product_id": "descript",
    "run_date": "2026-09-30",
    "session_type": "hands_on",
    "what": "Two sessions on the free plan. On 7 September we ran it by hand: Daan logged in, and we read every counter against a test file of exactly five minutes that we built inside the page; Descript was not a partner of ours then and contributed nothing. On 30 September, by then a PartnerStack partner, we drove Descript from Claude through Descript's connector, for Descript's partner content challenge, which pays the first five entries $250: we uploaded one of our own five-minute review videos and asked for vertical clips in plain sentences, once directly and once from a claude.ai chat.",
    "findings": [
     "The free plan's 100 AI credits are one-time, not monthly. Descript says so itself in two places: the plan card reads \"100 AI credits at signup\" for Free against \"400 AI credits / month\" for Hobbyist, and the usage screen inside the app puts \"Lifetime AI credits used 0/100\" next to \"Monthly media minutes used 0/60\". That pair of words -- lifetime against monthly -- is the whole answer.",
     "Media minutes come off at IMPORT, not at export, and per minute of media. Two five-minute files took the counter from 60m to 50m. Their own upload dialog says it too: \"Each file added uses media minutes\". Exporting costs no minutes and no credits, according to Descript itself.",
     "The AI assistant, Underlord, charges per instruction, and it does run on the free plan. Importing and transcribing cost 3 credits, Studio Sound over a ten-minute track 9 credits, and a question about the export settings 6 credits.",
     "An instruction that returns nothing still costs credits. \"Remove all filler words\" answered \"No filler words were found -- the script shows 0 words, so there's nothing to remove\" and deducted 2 credits anyway.",
     "Five instructions without a single real edit spent 20 of the 100 one-time credits. Anyone using the free plan as a trial is through it in an afternoon, and no more arrive.",
     "Studio Sound ran on Free, while the pricing table presents it as a Hobbyist benefit (\"Studio Sound, Remove Filler Words, Create Clips, and more\"). The line \"Limited use of Underlord\" on the free card is therefore more generous than the comparison table suggests.",
     "In onboarding, the consent \"Our team analyzes your project information\" is TICKED BY DEFAULT, in a step most people click straight through. You can turn it off, but you have to do it yourself.",
     "The watermark on the free plan sits in the bottom right of the frame; paid plans do not have it.",
     "Through Claude's Descript connector, a 5:15 review video of ours (94 MB) uploaded and transcribed in about 30 seconds. The import used 315 media seconds, consistent with minutes being charged at import.",
     "One sentence to Underlord through Claude (a vertical 9:16 clip of about 30 seconds on the price and the 90-day data limit, with captions, keeping the words and numbers as spoken) produced a new 24-second vertical composition in two and a half minutes for 48.3 AI credits. The original composition was left untouched, and the clip's transcript matched the source word for word, numbers included.",
     "From a claude.ai chat, Claude asked permission before each Descript action, read the transcript itself, chose the passage from 01:15 to 01:40 and had Underlord cut a 21-second vertical clip with burned-in captions in about three minutes. It also fixed the transcript's misspelling of the product name in the captions and said that it had.",
     "The vertical version is a centre crop. On our 16:9 video it cut off the text card at the side of the frame, and because our video already carries subtitles, Descript's captions landed on top of them. Ask for the full frame on a blurred background, and skip added captions when your source already has them.",
     "Our request to fix that was refused because the free plan had run out of AI credits: the one-time 100 were gone after our first session plus these two edits. Real editing work through Claude needs a paid plan.",
     "Publishing gave an unlisted share link and an MP4 download in about a minute and a half. We asked for 1080p and received 720x1280 with the watermark in the bottom right, so the 720p cap on the Free plan card is what applies, not the 4K that Descript's own assistant named in our first session."
    ],
    "not_tested": null,
    "report": null,
    "disclosure": null,
    "evidence_status": "original_session_record_not_retained",
    "result": "reported",
    "note": "Findings as written up after the session; no pass/fail per task was scored.",
    "in_catalog": true
   }
  ]
 },
 "open_questions": [
  {
   "question_id": "descript:cancellation_terms",
   "key": "cancellation_terms",
   "question": "Can a customer cancel at any time, and what happens to an annual plan that is cancelled mid-term?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "descript:data_export",
   "key": "data_export",
   "question": "Which data can a customer export, in which formats, on which plans?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "descript:data_location",
   "key": "data_location",
   "question": "Where is customer data stored, and can a customer choose the region?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "descript:pricing_gap_1",
   "key": "pricing_gap_1",
   "question": "Our price check could not put a number on this part of the cost: Media hours and AI credits are capped per tier (roughly 10, 30 and 40 hours a month, 400 to 1,500 credits), so footage volume can force a higher tier regardless of team size. Can you publish the price or the rule?",
   "status": "open"
  }
 ],
 "vendor_answers": [],
 "agent_channels": {
  "vendor_mcp": {
   "what": "First-party hosted server: import media, run Underlord edits, create and manage compositions, and export. Their API page presents it as the conversational way in — connect the Descript MCP to Claude or another assistant and trigger imports and edits by asking.",
   "plan": "Their own API page states API access is available for all paying users at no additional cost, with usage drawing from the AI credits and media minutes on your plan, and presents the MCP as a way to use that API (https://www.descript.com/api, read 14 Aug 2026).",
   "status": "Live",
   "source": "https://help.descript.com/api-and-mcp/mcp",
   "checked": "2026-07-28",
   "note": "The vendor's own MCP server, from our MCP research; it works with your own account at the vendor."
  },
  "agent_checkout": {
   "status": "not_found",
   "detail": "No explicit support for purchases by AI agents on the vendor's own pages.",
   "checked_at": "2026-10-07",
   "method": "homepage, /pricing and the pricing page we cite, read as plain HTML (no JavaScript) and searched for explicit support of purchases by AI agents: Agentic Commerce Protocol, Instant Checkout, Agent Payments Protocol, buy in ChatGPT, agentic checkout"
  }
 }
}