# Never

> Never (nevereditagain.com) is an online AI video editor with no timeline. You drop one raw
> recording; it returns a finished edited video, ~10 ranked short clips, word-timed captions,
> a thumbnail, and two weeks of per-platform posts — scheduled and published to up to 14
> platforms. The tagline is the product: "never edit again."

## What it does

- Full edit from one raw file: filler/dead-air removal, last-take selection, frame-accurate
  splicing with audio crossfades, word-timed captions in the customer's own locked style.
- Harvest: finds self-contained hook-and-payoff moments in long recordings and cuts ranked
  9:16/1:1 clips with measured face-tracked reframes.
- Brand Engine: builds a locked style system (colours, type, pacing, hooks) from the
  customer's own posts, so output looks like them, not like a template.
- Publishing: per-platform captions and hooks, scheduling calendar, direct publishing,
  analytics. Where other AI editors end at "export", Never's last step is "posted".
- NLE escape hatch: exports real Premiere/CapCut projects with every cut intact.

## Pricing (launch)

- Local — $19/mo: bring your own AI (Claude/ChatGPT) via MCP; 40 finished minutes included,
  then $0.30/min. Install: `claude mcp add never -- npx -y @never/mcp --key <key>`
- Pro — $79/mo: Never's own AI plans every cut; 40 finished minutes, then $0.90/min.
- Agency — $399/mo: 10 brands, 300 finished minutes, client approval gates.
- Social Studio add-on — $15/mo per set of 5 connected social accounts.
- Usage is per finished minute of rendered output. Failed renders and unchanged re-renders
  are free. First video is edited free, no card.

## Core pages

- https://nevereditagain.com/ — product
- https://nevereditagain.com/start — free first edit
- https://nevereditagain.com/help — the help center: every question answered
- https://nevereditagain.com/llms-full.txt — the complete help content as plain text, for AI assistants
- https://nevereditagain.com/ihatepremiere — for Premiere refugees
- https://nevereditagain.com/ihatecapcut — for CapCut exporters
- https://nevereditagain.com/ihatetimelines — the no-timeline mechanic
- https://nevereditagain.com/ihatevideoediting — the backlog folder

## Canonical pages

### what-is
- https://nevereditagain.com/what-is/edl — An EDL (edit decision list) is the machine-readable list of cuts that defines an edit. What it contains, why AI editors need one, and how it keeps you portable.
- https://nevereditagain.com/what-is/j-cut — A J-cut lets the next shot's audio start before its picture. Why editors use it, why it hides cuts, and why AI editors that skip it sound choppy.
- https://nevereditagain.com/what-is/frame-rate — Frame rate is how many pictures per second a video shows. What 23.976 vs 30 vs 60 fps means, and why cuts that ignore the frame grid drift out of sync.
- https://nevereditagain.com/what-is/b-roll — B-roll is the footage you cut away to while the main track keeps talking. What counts as B-roll, why it hides edits, and how much you actually need.
- https://nevereditagain.com/what-is/loudness — Loudness is perceived audio level, measured in LUFS. What -14 LUFS means, why platforms normalize, and why dynamic loudness tools make voices pump.
- https://nevereditagain.com/what-is/9-16-aspect-ratio — 9:16 is vertical video — 1080×1920 — the native format of TikTok, Reels and Shorts. Safe zones, reframing from 16:9, and what the platforms crop.
- https://nevereditagain.com/what-is/mcp — MCP — Model Context Protocol — is the open standard that lets AI assistants like Claude use external tools. How it works and what it means for video editing.

### features
- https://nevereditagain.com/features/clips — Never's Harvest finds self-contained hook-and-payoff moments in a long recording and cuts ranked 9:16 clips — reframed, captioned, scheduled.
- https://nevereditagain.com/features/captions — Word-timed captions from WhisperX, corrected for your jargon and brand names, burned in your locked style — plus .vtt for accessibility.
- https://nevereditagain.com/features/scheduling — Never's calendar schedules and publishes every deliverable to up to 14 platforms — per-platform captions, pre-flight repair, and analytics that feed the next edit.
- https://nevereditagain.com/features/brand — Never's Brand Engine reads your existing content and builds a locked style system — colours, type, caption style, pacing — applied to every video.
- https://nevereditagain.com/features/reframe — Never reframes 16:9 to vertical by measuring where your face actually is — per scene, per frame — instead of center-cropping and hoping.

### integrations
- https://nevereditagain.com/integrations/tiktok — Connect TikTok once and every finished edit can schedule and publish itself — validated against TikTok's duration, aspect and size limits before submission.
- https://nevereditagain.com/integrations/instagram — Connect Instagram once; Reels publish themselves — vertical enforced, duration caps checked, captions written Instagram-native, all before submission.
- https://nevereditagain.com/integrations/youtube — Connect a channel once: long-form uploads with titles, descriptions and thumbnails, plus Shorts under 60 seconds vertical — validated before submission.
- https://nevereditagain.com/integrations/linkedin — Connect LinkedIn once; videos post with professional-register copy, validated against LinkedIn's video specs and copy length before submission.
- https://nevereditagain.com/integrations/claude-mcp — One command connects Claude to Never's editing engine: your Claude subscription does the thinking, Never does the cutting and publishing. $19/month.

### for
- https://nevereditagain.com/for/creators — Never turns every recording into a week of posts: cut, captioned in your style, reframed, scheduled. Built for creators posting 4–7×/week. From $19/mo.
- https://nevereditagain.com/for/founders — One recording a week becomes a daily presence: edited, branded, scheduled to LinkedIn and YouTube. Built for founders and operators. $79/mo, ROI-priced.
- https://nevereditagain.com/for/agencies — Multi-brand workspaces, locked per-client styles, approval gates and per-client usage. Triple output per editor without hiring. From $399/mo.

### vs
- https://nevereditagain.com/vs/opus-clip — Opus Clip turns long videos into ranked clips. Never does that too, then edits, brands, captions, schedules and publishes. Compared honestly, with dated evidence.
- https://nevereditagain.com/vs/submagic — Submagic styles captions and polish on short clips. Never edits the whole recording and publishes it. Which fits depends on how much of the job is left.
- https://nevereditagain.com/vs/descript — Descript is a full editor you drive by editing text. Never is an editor that drives itself and ends at published posts. Different philosophies, compared fairly.
- https://nevereditagain.com/vs/vyra — Vyra edits your raw footage conversationally into a timeline you control. Never edits conversationally too — then publishes. The closest comparison in the category.

### alternatives
- https://nevereditagain.com/alternatives/opus-clip — Seven real alternatives to Opus Clip for clipping, captioning and publishing — ranked by what you're actually trying to change, with verified prices.
- https://nevereditagain.com/alternatives/submagic — Seven real alternatives to Submagic for captions, clipping and the rest of the pipeline — ranked by what you're switching for, prices verified 2026-08-01.
- https://nevereditagain.com/alternatives/descript — Seven real alternatives to Descript — for people leaving hands-on editing, and people looking for a different hands-on editor. Prices verified 2026-08-01.

### best
- https://nevereditagain.com/best/ai-video-editors — Eight AI video editors, tested on the same raw recording and ranked by scope, output quality and price — including the categories where we're not the pick.

### tools
- https://nevereditagain.com/tools/aspect-ratio-calculator — Free video aspect-ratio calculator: enter any dimensions, get the simplified ratio and the exact crop for 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 and 16:9 exports. No signup.
- https://nevereditagain.com/tools/safe-zone-checker — Drop a frame from your vertical video and see exactly what TikTok, Reels and Shorts UI will cover — the top 200px and bottom 300px bands. Free, in-browser.
- https://nevereditagain.com/tools/caption-length-checker — Paste a caption and see instantly where it fits and where it gets rejected — X's 280, Bluesky's 300, TikTok's 2200 and more. Free, no signup.
- https://nevereditagain.com/tools/video-to-transcript — Upload a video or audio file, get an accurate transcript with word-level timestamps — the same WhisperX engine that captions every Never video. No account.

### blog
- https://nevereditagain.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-edit-a-youtube-video — Measured task by task: a properly edited 12-minute YouTube video takes about 6.5 hours — before clips, thumbnails and uploading. Where the time goes.
- https://nevereditagain.com/blog/why-ai-edited-video-sounds-choppy — Three audio bugs make AI edits sound chopped: fractional cuts padding silence, butt-spliced waveforms clicking, and 50ms-late word timestamps. The fixes.
- https://nevereditagain.com/blog/the-editing-tax-338-hours — One weekly recording, edited properly, costs 338 hours a year — 8.5 working weeks. The data behind the number, and what it means for your content math.

### research
- https://nevereditagain.com/research/editing-tax — Editing one weekly recording properly costs 338 hours a year — 8.5 working weeks. The full task-by-task methodology, assumptions and data, published for reuse.

# Help — every question answered

> Human-readable version: https://nevereditagain.com/help

## Getting started.

### What is Never?

Never is an AI video editor with no timeline. You drop one raw recording; it returns a finished edited video, around ten ranked short clips, word-timed captions, a thumbnail, and two weeks of per-platform posts — scheduled and published. You describe what you want in a sentence, or say nothing and take the defaults a good editor would pick.

### How do I make my first video?

Go to nevereditagain.com/start and drop a file — anywhere on the page. Your first video is edited free, the full treatment: cut, clips, captions, thumbnail, and two weeks of posts, scheduled. No card until you’ve seen it. We ask for your email while it renders so we can send you the result.

### What exactly do I get back from one recording?

The finished long-form cut with filler and dead air removed. Ranked vertical clips found by Harvest, each reframed and captioned. Word-timed captions in your style, plus a .vtt sidecar. Three thumbnail variants. Per-platform captions and a two-week posting schedule. And, if you want to keep editing yourself, a real Premiere or CapCut project with every cut intact.

### What files can I upload?

Any video or audio file. Long-form is welcome — a 3-hour recording is normal input. Audio-only works too; you still get the cut, clips and captions.

### What languages does it support?

Any language WhisperX handles. German, Spanish, French and Portuguese are first-class — including captions, per-platform copy and your brand’s vocabulary.

### Do I need to know how to prompt?

No. Typing nothing is a supported input — the defaults are the ones a good editor would pick. If you do want something specific, one plain sentence is enough: “make this punchier”, “pull the 5 best moments”, “captions like my last one”.

## How the edit works.

### What does Never actually do to my footage?

It transcribes every word with timestamps, then makes editorial decisions the way an editor would: every um, every dead pause, every abandoned take goes; when you said the same thing twice, it keeps the last take. Cuts snap to the frame grid and cross-fade over real room tone. A quality gate listens to every joint before you ever see the result, and re-renders the ones it doesn’t like.

### Why doesn’t it sound choppy like other AI editors?

Three reasons. Cuts land on the frame grid instead of at fractional times, so nothing pads with silence. Joints are cross-faded over room tone instead of butt-spliced, so they don’t click. And word boundaries are refined against the actual audio onset, because speech recognition timestamps run tens of milliseconds late. Each of those is a bug you can hear in most AI edits.

### What if I don’t like the cut?

Tell it. “Tighter.” “Keep the client story.” “Less music.” It re-cuts. Re-rendering an unchanged edit is free and trying again costs nothing, so you can iterate without watching a meter.

### Can I control the edit precisely?

Yes. Every project has a cut sheet (every cut, with the reason it was made), a takes view for choosing between repeated takes, a word-level transcript, and a per-clip editor. On the Local plan your own AI can also apply typed, fine-grained edit operations — moving a boundary by two frames is one call.

### What is an EDL?

The edit decision list — the machine-readable list of cuts that defines your edit. Never’s whole edit is an EDL, which is why it can re-render, export to Premiere or CapCut with real edit points, and hand you the entire edit as JSON. You are never locked into a proprietary project file.

### Can I watch it work?

Yes. While it edits, the project shows its actual decisions as it makes them — what it cut and why, which take it kept, what the quality gate flagged. It’s the same information an editor would give you across the desk, not a progress bar.

## Clips, captions and thumbnails.

### How does Harvest pick clips?

It looks for self-contained moments with a hook and a payoff — a claim, a story, a number that lands — and ranks them. It does not chop your video into equal slices and hope. You see the ranked list and promote or reorder before anything renders.

### How does the vertical reframe work?

It measures where your head actually is — every frame, every scene — and frames the 9:16 crop like a human camera operator would. It never center-crops and hopes. Safe zones for each platform’s UI are respected, so captions don’t sit under the TikTok share button.

### How do captions work?

Captions are word-timed to your speech — including your jargon, product names and brand names, which are corrected against your brand vocabulary. They render burned-in, in your locked style, and every deliverable ships a .vtt sidecar for accessibility and platform caption tracks.

### How are thumbnails made?

From your face and your locked style, in three variants per video. No stock arrows, no yellow circles unless that is genuinely your style.

### What about music and graphics?

Music is a bed that sits under your voice and never fights it — flat by default, ducked around speech. Graphics are planned from the transcript: when you mention the numbers, a stat card in your brand style can appear at exactly that beat. Both are optional and both obey the brand system.

## Your brand.

### What is the Brand Engine?

Give it one handle or URL. It reads your existing posts and derives your style — colours, type, caption look, pacing, hook rhythm — into a locked style system that every video obeys. Locked means consistent, not frozen: you can edit any part of it in the brand editor, and the change applies from then on.

### Will my videos look like AI made them?

No. Template tools give everyone the same video — same bouncing captions, same stock zoom, same three fonts — and audiences can tell. Never builds the style system from your own work and locks it. Ten thousand customers, ten thousand different-looking videos.

### Can I run more than one brand?

Pro includes 2 brands, Agency includes 10. Each brand has its own locked style, its own social accounts, and — on Agency — its own client approval flow. The Local and Free tiers have 1.

### Can I show it a video I want mine to feel like?

Yes. Drop a reference video in the Reference tab and Never extracts what makes it feel that way — pacing, colour, transition habits — and applies it to your edits without copying the content. Only use references you have the right to learn from.

## Pricing and billing.

### What are the plans?

Local, $19/month: your own Claude or ChatGPT does the thinking via MCP, 40 finished minutes included, then $0.30/min. Pro, $79/month: Never’s own AI plans every cut, 40 finished minutes, then $0.90/min, 2 brands, 1 Social Studio set included. Agency, $399/month: 10 brands, 300 finished minutes, then $0.75/min, 3 sets, client approval gates, priority rendering. Annual is 2 months free. The free Founding Cut edits your first video with no card.

### What is a finished minute?

60 seconds of successfully rendered output video, rounded up to 0.1 min per render job. Measured on output, never input — a 60-minute podcast that yields three 30-second clips costs 1.5 minutes, not 60. Nobody has intuition for a “credit”, which is exactly why we don’t sell credits.

### What is always free?

Failed renders — our bug, our cost. Re-rendering an unchanged edit — it’s a cache hit. Previews, scrubbing, planning, the cut sheet. And transcription, unlimited: it runs once per source, forever.

### Can I get a surprise invoice?

No. Spend caps are on by default at 3× your plan price. When the cap is hit, renders queue instead of failing, you get one email, and raising the cap is one click. Nothing silently keeps billing.

### Do included minutes roll over?

No, and we say so at checkout. The allowance is deliberately generous instead — 40 minutes is more than most Pro customers use in a month.

### How does billing work?

Every 4 weeks, 13 times a year — disclosed exactly that way at checkout, e.g. “$79 every 4 weeks (13 times a year)”. Annual plans bill once for 12 months, 2 months free. Extra creator seats are $9/month each, prorated.

### Do you charge for storage?

No. Raw footage moves to infrequent-access storage after 30 days and is deleted after 180 unless the project is starred — stated at upload. Deliverables are kept while your account is active.

### Will my price change?

Founding members — the first 1,000 accounts — keep $19 / $79 / $399 for life. After that, list pricing moves to $29 / $99 / $499. Existing accounts never move.

### Is there a guarantee?

Post 30 videos made with Never in your first 30 days. If your reach didn’t go up, we refund every cent — and you keep everything we made. We check it automatically from your connected accounts; you don’t have to prove anything.

## The $19 plan and MCP.

### How can the Local plan cost $19?

Never is two things: a brain that decides what to cut, and an engine that does the cutting. On Local, your existing Claude or ChatGPT subscription is the brain — you’re already paying for it, so we don’t charge you for it twice. You get the identical render engine as Pro. This is also why you can trust the $79 price: we are not marking up tokens invisibly.

### What is MCP?

Model Context Protocol — the open standard that lets AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT use external tools. Never ships an MCP server, so your assistant can upload footage, direct the edit, render, and publish, all from the conversation you already work in.

### How do I connect Claude to Never?

Create a key under Settings → Keys in the app — it’s shown exactly once, and the install command comes pre-filled with it. For Claude Code:

$ claude mcp add never -- npx -y @never/mcp --key nvr_live_…

For claude.ai, ChatGPT and other hosted clients, add the remote server `https://mcp.nevereditagain.com/v1` — sign-in happens in the browser via OAuth, no key handling at all.

### What can my assistant actually do?

The full pipeline: create projects, upload local files, cut, reframe, caption, add graphics and music, harvest clips, generate thumbnails, render, export Premiere/CapCut projects, read and edit the EDL op-by-op, build and update your brand, and — with Social Studio — schedule and publish. There are also one-shot prompts: `/never:full` runs the whole pipeline, `/never:shorts` clips and schedules, `/never:repurpose` starts from a published URL, `/never:fix` diagnoses a cut you don’t like.

### How do uploads from my laptop work?

You name a file; the local MCP process uploads a small 720p proxy first so editing starts in seconds, then streams the original in the background — resumable, so a killed process picks up where it left off. It never reads outside the paths you named. No directory scanning, ever.

### What does MCP usage cost?

Only rendering is metered — same rules as every plan: finished minutes on success, failed renders free, cache hits free, everything read-only free. Every tool response includes a usage block, so your assistant can tell you what an operation cost and where you stand in the month. Your assistant’s token cost is between you and your AI provider — that’s the point of the plan.

### How are API keys handled?

Keys look like `nvr_live_…`, are stored only as a SHA-256 hash, and are shown once at creation. You can hold several keys, revoke any of them individually, scope a key to a brand or a tool allowlist, and see when each was last used. Rate limit is 600 requests/min per key.

## Publishing and Social Studio.

### What is Social Studio?

The add-on that takes you from “export” to “posted”. $15/month per profile-set — a set is up to 5 connected social accounts. The default five are YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook; swap any of them for LinkedIn, Threads, Pinterest, Bluesky, Snapchat, Google Business or Discord. Pro includes 1 set, Agency includes 3.

### What does it add?

The calendar, posting queues, per-platform caption variants, pre-flight repair, direct publishing, approval gates, client review links, analytics and the hook leaderboard. Never writes the caption for each platform in the format that platform rewards, picks the time, queues it, publishes it, and tells you when it’s live.

### Do I need it?

No. Everything upstream works without it — cut, clips, captions, thumbnails, NLE export, MCP. You download the files and post them yourself. Social Studio is for when the posting itself is the chore you want gone.

### What is pre-flight repair?

Before anything is submitted, each post is validated against the platform’s real limits — duration, aspect ratio, file size, caption length — and repaired or flagged before submission, not bounced after. A doomed upload never leaves the queue.

### What do the analytics feed?

Per-post performance flows back into a hook leaderboard — which openings actually held viewers — and the next edit uses what worked. It’s the feedback loop a good editor keeps in their head, kept in yours.

## Exports and compatibility.

### Can I keep editing in Premiere or CapCut?

Yes — export a real project file with every cut intact as an actual edit point on the timeline, not a flattened video. Fix one thing by hand without redoing the edit.

### What else can I take out?

Every rendered deliverable as MP4. Word-timed captions as .vtt. The complete edit as EDL JSON. Your transcript. There is no export tax and no proprietary format between you and your work.

## Teams, seats and client review.

### How do seats work?

Local and Free include 1 seat, Pro includes 2, Agency includes 5. Extra creator seats are $9/month each, prorated. Reviewer and client seats are free and unlimited — the people who approve don’t cost you anything.

### Can my clients approve before anything posts?

On Agency, yes. Each brand can require approval: the client gets a review link — no account needed, white-label so it carries your name — and nothing publishes until they approve. Comments land on the exact frame.

## Privacy and your data.

### Do you train on my footage?

No. Never. Your footage is used to edit your videos, and for nothing else.

### How is my footage protected?

Isolated per tenant, encrypted at rest, served only through short-lived signed URLs. Deleted on request within 24 hours.

### How long do you keep my files?

Raw footage: 30 days hot, then infrequent-access, deleted after 180 days unless the project is starred. Deliverables: kept while your account is active. After cancellation: a 30-day retrieval window, then deletion.

## Account and cancellation.

### How do I cancel?

In the app: Settings → Subscription → Cancel subscription. Online, no call, no chat, no retention maze. Your access stays live until the end of the paid period, and the confirmation arrives in writing.

### What happens to my videos if I cancel?

You get a 30-day retrieval window to download everything — deliverables, captions, transcripts, and your EDLs as JSON. After that, deletion. Your edits leave with you.

### Is there a referral program?

Yes — it appears in your account after your first retained month. You share a link; when someone becomes a paying customer, you both benefit. The exact terms are published in the app under referral terms.

## When something goes wrong.

### My render failed.

Failed renders are free, always — our bug, our cost. Most failures retry themselves; if a project stays stuck, write to cut@nevereditagain.com with the project name and we’ll look at the actual job, not send you a checklist.

### My assistant can’t reach the MCP server.

A 401 means the key: it may be revoked, mistyped, or from the wrong account. Keys are shown once, so if it’s lost, revoke it and create a new one under Settings → Keys. For hosted clients, remove and re-add `https://mcp.nevereditagain.com/v1` and complete the browser sign-in again.

### How do I reach a human?

cut@nevereditagain.com. Pro gets email support answered within 24 hours; Agency gets a shared Slack channel answered within 4. Every plan’s mail is read by a person either way.