A screen recorder that asks for nothing, then grew into an editor.

Recording a quick demo shouldn’t require choosing a subscription. Yet every option I looked at charged something: money, features, privacy or an account. I wrote the conditions down and designed the product to remove every one of them.

Most recorders merge everything into pixels the moment you press stop. Iveeo records screen and mic with one recorder and the webcam with a second, both streaming to disk in chunks so a long take never builds up a multi-gigabyte file in memory. The cursor is sampled 30 times a second and saved as data.

Every recording is a session folder: screen.webm, webcam.webm, cursor.json and a project.json. Editing happens on that folder. The webcam stays a layer you can move, resize or drop, and the cursor stays a path you can smooth, spotlight or zoom on.

v0.2 shipped as a recorder. The next two months turned it into an editor, and the separate tracks made that possible without re-recording anything. Every edit is stored as data in project.json and applied only at export, so you can change a zoom, a backdrop or a cut next month and export again.

The brand kit is one set of settings applied to every export: backdrop, padding, corner radius, shadow and logo, with presets and per-recording overrides. It styles the MP4 and the HTML player with the same values.

Stories sit above recordings. A Story references several takes and puts them all on one timeline, so you edit across recordings and export a single joined video. The first version opened one recording at a time. I rebuilt it so every take in a Story sits on the same timeline and exports as one video.

Auto-zoom reads the cursor track and suggests zoom moments you can keep, move or delete. The first heuristic zoomed wherever the cursor lingered. In practice that meant zooming on a mouse left still while someone talked, which added movement without adding meaning.

The rewrite looks at how the cursor moves. A zoom lands where deliberate travel comes to rest, or where small, sustained movement shows someone working in one place. A parked cursor never triggers one, trailing idle time is trimmed, and nearby moments merge.

Two rules are fixed in code because they protect the viewer: every generated zoom eases in and out over one second and lasts at least five seconds. Fast, short zooms are what make screen recordings uncomfortable to watch.

The first Pro model gated features one by one: auto-zoom locked, brand kit locked, Stories locked. That put a lock in front of people before they could see what a feature would do for their video.

I replaced it with one gate, at export. The whole editor is open to everyone to try and preview. A raw capture with trims, cuts and chapters still exports free, at full resolution, with no watermark. Only an export that carries editing layers (zoom, brand, splash, text, redaction, retiming or an audio mix) asks for Pro, and it offers “Export raw instead” as the free way out.

That last promise is protected by a test: it fails if the free export quality ever ends up behind a gate. Pro is still in development and isn’t on sale yet.

The first AI feature ran fully on the device: a 4B-parameter model that turned chat requests like “remove the silences and zoom on every click” into editor actions. It worked, but on typical hardware it was slow and unreliable at exactly what mattered, like picking the right timestamps across several steps. It also needed a 2.5 GB download.

So I removed it. AI now runs in the cloud through a small proxy that holds the API key, since a key shipped inside an Electron app can be extracted. In the app, the AI Agent appears as a preview: Free and Pro users get two real runs on a sample recording to see the plan it produces before deciding to pay.

The AI Agent is in development and not public yet.

“Free, no watermark” is only a promise if it costs nothing to keep. Every export renders locally, so there’s no cloud bill behind it. I also picked codecs so that no licensing fees come up later:

Honest first run. macOS won’t let an app grant itself Screen Recording access, and the permission only takes effect after a relaunch. Onboarding walks through Screen Recording, Microphone and Accessibility one at a time, detects each grant automatically and explains why a relaunch is needed.

A toolbar that’s never in the shot. The floating Pause / Stop / Restart / Discard bar stays on top but is excluded from capture, and ⌘⇧S works from anywhere.

Hear it before you ship it. Mic noise reduction runs live, so you hear the result before exporting.

A project is a file. A .iveeo file holds the recording and every edit, so you can move it to another machine or keep it as a backup.