Clipto

What it actually does

Clipto indexes media you already have. Point the desktop app at your drives and it transcribes speech, tags people and scenes, and lets you find a moment by describing it instead of scrubbing through folders. That indexing runs on your own machine, with plugins for Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve and an MCP server so Claude or ChatGPT can pull clips out of your library when you ask them to. There is also a browser version and an iPhone app, both cloud powered, and plain transcription is what most subscribers seem to buy it for.

It wants real hardware: an Apple silicon Mac with 16GB of memory, or 12GB on the Windows beta. The company is not a weekend project either. TechCrunch reported it at $15 million in annual recurring revenue at the start of 2026, profitable, with just over 20 staff across San Francisco, Hong Kong and Singapore, and a $250 million valuation on a round closed in August. Founder Henry Kang sold his previous video startup to Tencent in 2020. The search works, and on a laptop full of footage it is the fastest way we know to find one shot.

What it costs

There is no free plan, whatever the word free in the landing page addresses suggests. You get a 7-day trial, then $9.99 for the first month and $24.99 a month after that, or $149.88 a year, which is $12.49 a month. The discounted first month is the figure the ads quote. The $24.99 is the figure you pay from month two on a monthly plan, which is more than ChatGPT or Claude costs.

The 4.6 everyone quotes

Clipto's site leads with a 4.6 Trustpilot average across 2,425 reviews, and one landing page rounds that up to 4.7. The average is real. The shape under it matters more: 2,103 five-star reviews, 219 one-star reviews, and 103 across the three bands between them. That is not a spread of opinion, it is two different customer experiences. Trustpilot also labels the profile as a paid subscription where the company invites its own customers to review, so the five-star pile is partly solicited and the one-star pile arrived on its own.

The one-stars say the same thing over and over, which is that people were charged after they thought they had cancelled. Trustpilot's own summary of recent reviews puts it as unexpected charges or automatic renewals after the trial. The iPhone app, where nobody is soliciting reviews, sits at 3.8 from 41 ratings, and the complaints there are cancellation loops and support confirming a cancellation without actually cancelling. There is no G2 or Capterra presence to check any of this against, so the billing complaints are the only large independent signal available.

The terms of service do not help. They contain a cancellation clause and no refund policy at all, beyond the boilerplate Apple requires for App Store purchases. Cancelling ends access at the end of the paid term, and a charge you did not expect is left to support's discretion.

Read the terms before you record a client

Two clauses are worth knowing. The terms say the site is not tailored to comply with HIPAA and that you may not use it if your interactions would be subject to those laws, while the iPhone listing markets the app for doctor visits, legal interviews and client calls. Both positions cannot be right, and the risk lands on you.

The other is a prohibition on using the site to disparage or tarnish the company, in its opinion. We publish this review with a referral link on it and that clause still applies to us, which is why we are pointing at it.

What we would do

Buy it monthly if the local search solves a real problem for you, and treat the first month as an introductory rate rather than the price. Do not pay for a year up front. Cancel from the billing page, keep the confirmation, and if a charge lands anyway go to your card issuer rather than arguing it out over email. The product is good. The subscription is the part that needs watching.