Clarus.dev
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Clarus is a Windows screenshot and screen-recording app built around one idea: a capture should still be useful a month later.
Take a shot with Win+Shift+S โ Clarus takes over the Snipping Tool's shortcut โ and a capture card appears in the corner. Drag it straight into any app, copy it, annotate it, or pin it on top of everything else.
Recordings open in an editor with a real timeline: trim, split, move clips, add zoom segments, blur anything sensitive, and export.
Everything is searchable by the text inside it. Text recognition runs entirely on your machine, so you can search "invoice" and get the screenshot of an invoice you took in March. Nothing is uploaded unless you choose to share it.
Free forever, no account: area, window and fullscreen screenshots, screen recording with audio, the annotation editor for both, pin on top, the screen colour picker, and capture history with search.
Pro adds: scrolling capture for whole pages, Copy Text extraction, webcam in recordings, backgrounds, capture folders and multi-drag, Instant Replay, and 5 GB of cloud storage with expiring, password-protected share links.
$5.99/month, $39/year or $99 once. 30-day trial, no card required.
Castmint turns one typed line into a finished vertical short: AI script, voiceover, synced captions and visuals โ ready to post on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.
The problem: short-form video is the highest-leverage format on the internet, but every single short costs an evening โ scripting, recording a voiceover, syncing captions, hunting for visuals, cutting it vertical. That's why most channels go quiet.
What Castmint does: type a topic โ "5 underrated productivity apps", "why your houseplants keep dying" โ and Castmint assembles the whole thing:
Who it's for: faceless channels, creators who hate editing, and small brands that want to look active on TikTok, Reels and Shorts without a video team.
One input, whole pipeline: most tools automate a single step โ voiceover, or captions, or stock clips. Castmint goes from a typed idea to a finished, publishable short in one pass, and still gives you a timeline editor for control.
Your first three videos are free, no card required.
Clarus.dev CastmintClarus.dev's answer
Every capture is indexed by the text inside it. Text recognition runs locally the moment you take a screenshot or finish a recording, so months later you can search for a word you remember seeing and get the picture straight back. Most capture tools leave you with a folder of files named by timestamp; Clarus leaves you with something you can actually search.
It also takes over Win+Shift+S, so it lives where your hand already goes rather than asking you to learn a new shortcut.
Castmint's answer:
Most AI video tools automate a single step โ voiceover, or captions, or stock clips โ and leave you to stitch the rest together yourself. Castmint goes from one typed line to a finished, publishable vertical short in a single pass: script, AI voiceover, synced captions and visuals, all in one automated flow. You still get a full timeline editor when you want to polish it by hand.
Clarus.dev's answer
Most Windows users are really choosing against the Snipping Tool, which they already have. Clarus does everything it does, then keeps the capture useful: a searchable history, screen recording on a real editing timeline, annotation for both screenshots and video, and share links you can expire or password-protect. The Snipping Tool captures and forgets.
Against a paid tool like Snagit, the differences are that text recognition runs entirely on your machine rather than in a cloud, the free tier is permanent and needs no account, and nothing leaves your computer unless you explicitly choose to share it.
Castmint's answer:
Castmint removes the assembly work, not just one piece of it. You type an idea and get a complete short ready to post โ no separate tools for scripting, voice, captions and editing. Your first three videos are free with no card required, so you can judge the output on your own topic before committing to anything.
Clarus.dev's answer
People on Windows who take a lot of screenshots as part of their work and keep losing them: developers filing bug reports, support and QA teams, designers collecting references, writers and teachers making documentation, and anyone who screenshots a receipt, a booking confirmation or an error message and needs it again weeks later.
It is built for individuals and small teams rather than large IT-managed rollouts.
Castmint's answer:
Faceless-channel creators, solo YouTubers/TikTokers who'd rather not be on camera, and small brands that want to post consistently on TikTok, Reels and Shorts without hiring a video team or an editor.
Clarus.dev's answer
It started as a personal annoyance. I took screenshots constantly and never found them again โ a folder of thousands of files named by timestamp is not a record of anything. The obvious fix was to make the pictures searchable by what is written in them, which meant running text recognition locally on every capture instead of shipping them off to a server.
Everything else grew out of using it daily: the annotation editor, then screen recording, then a real video timeline, because trimming a recording in something else was slower than building the tool. Clarus is made by one person in the UAE.
Castmint's answer:
Castmint started because the founder's own channel kept going quiet โ not from a lack of ideas, but because every short cost an evening of scripting, recording, captioning and cutting. Castmint automates that whole pipeline, so one typed idea becomes a finished, ready-to-post short in minutes instead of hours.
Clarus.dev's answer
Rust and Tauri 2 for the native Windows layer, React 19 with TypeScript for the interface, and Vite for the build.
Capture uses Windows Graphics Capture and DXGI Desktop Duplication; recording encodes through Media Foundation with hardware H.264 where the GPU supports it. Text recognition is PaddleOCR running locally through tract, a pure-Rust inference engine, with the Windows OCR API as a fast first pass.
The cloud side is Supabase with Cloudflare Pages.
Castmint's answer:
Built on Next.js and TypeScript, with AI generation powered by OpenAI, ElevenLabs and fal.ai.
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