Should you build your own Shade?
AI-indexed asset manager for creative teams: search footage by face, transcript, scene description, or a full sentence
The search half is real and rebuildable. Extract keyframes with ffmpeg, embed them with CLIP, transcribe the audio with whisper, put the vectors in SQLite, and 'the drone shot over the bridge at golden hour' finds the clip on your own drives. The open-source stack for that is mature and the result is genuinely good. What does not survive the port is what Shade has grown into: cloud streaming so an editor opens full-res without waiting on a download, per-link permissions and guest access, review and approval, and a model pipeline that keeps improving without you retraining anything. Solo, on local storage, the DIY version wins outright. On a team, you are rebuilding a platform and calling it a script.
ENOriginal research content in English. Original prompt preserved in English.
Build me a semantic search engine for my own footage to replace Shade. Requirements:
- A Python CLI plus a small FastAPI web UI on localhost. SQLite with sqlite-vec for
the vectors and the metadata, one file at ~/FootageIndex/index.db.
- `index <folder>` walks the tree, and for every video ffmpeg pulls a keyframe every
5 seconds plus one at each scene cut detected by the ffmpeg scene filter.
- Each keyframe is embedded with open_clip (ViT-B/32) and stored with its timestamp.
Stills and photos get the same treatment as a single frame.
- Audio goes through whisper.cpp for a transcript with word timestamps, chunked into
30-second windows and embedded with sentence-transformers for text search.
- The search box takes a plain sentence and searches image and transcript vectors
together, returning ranked results as thumbnail, filename, and timecode. Clicking
one opens the clip at that exact frame in a player.
- Indexing is incremental and resumable, keyed on file path plus mtime plus size, and
prints a running count so an overnight run is checkable in the morning.
- Everything runs on my machine, models included · no accounts, no cloud, no
telemetry, no API keys. Files are read only, never moved or renamed.
- Out of scope: face recognition, sharing links, review and comments, and team sync.
Do not build auth or a server deployment, this is a single-user local tool.
- README: installing ffmpeg and whisper.cpp, first-run model downloads, an honest
estimate of indexing hours per TB on CPU versus GPU, and how to reset the index.The prompt opens pre-filled in your agent. Review it before running.
What would building your own look like?
Walk my drives, pull keyframes and transcripts, embed both with CLIP and whisper into a local vector index, then search the whole library in plain English.
What you will need
- ffmpeg
- a CLIP model via transformers.js or Python
- whisper.cpp
- sqlite-vec or another local vector store
- a GPU, or patience measured in nights
They pay because the search only matters if the whole team gets it. A local index that only lives on the editor's machine solves the editor's problem and nobody else's, and the person who most needs to find the clip is usually the one furthest from the storage. Shade sells the index plus the delivery of what the index found, and the second half is the expensive one.
xcloud streaming of full-res files without downloading them first
xguest links with per-link permissions and roles
xbuilt-in review, approval, and commenting
xface recognition and shot-type tagging that improves without your involvement
xteam sync, so everyone searches the same index
xthe NLE plugins and Slack integration
Prefer something ready-made?
ResourceSpaceFaces, sentence search and local transcripts in an old-school DAM; installation has not discovered joy.Open source↗License, setup, and limitations for each alternative.
How much does Shade cost?
- Monthly billing
- $35/mo$35/mo · per person
- Per year
- $420/yr$420/yr
- Annual billing
- $357/yr15% cheaper than paying monthly
- On a Brazilian card, with 3.5% IOF
- R$183/moR$1,866/yr
Saved to My list. You will see a notice on this site when the price changes.
You complete the purchase on Shade’s site. Vibe Radar does not handle payments.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | What is included |
|---|---|---|---|
| growth | $35/user≈ $35 | $29.75/user≈ $29.75 | 1 workspace; up to 15 paid seats; 150 guests; 500 GB active storage/seat |
| enterprise | custom | - | Unlimited workspaces and seats; 250 guests; 1 TB active storage/seat; 1 TB bring-your-own S3 storage/seat |
Free tierno free tier; trial length and numeric trial caps are not publicly disclosed
Billing termsmonthly + annual (15% lower)
Additional costsGrowth is capped at one workspace and 15 paid seats; storage expansion and enterprise bring-your-own-storage workflows require a higher plan or add-on.
verified 2026-08-14 · source ↗
Is it cheaper to build or buy Shade?
Adjust the numbers: hours to build, your hourly rate, running costs and the subscription price.
Over 24 months, subscribing is cheaper.
Starting hours estimated from the analysis (multi-day). Does not price what you give up (support, integrations, security).
Can I rebuild Shade?
Kinda. The core of Shade is buildable in a weekend with the prompt on this page, but there are real gaps: cloud streaming of full-res files without downloading them first, guest links with per-link permissions and roles. Read the honest list above before committing.
How much does Shade cost?
Shade costs about $35/mo (Growth, checked 10/20/2026), which is $357 per year.
What do I lose by replacing Shade?
Honestly: cloud streaming of full-res files without downloading them first; guest links with per-link permissions and roles; built-in review, approval, and commenting; face recognition and shot-type tagging that improves without your involvement; team sync, so everyone searches the same index; the NLE plugins and Slack integration. If any of those are load-bearing for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to Shade?
Yes: ResourceSpace (Faces, sentence search and local transcripts in an old-school DAM; installation has not discovered joy.) The prompt is for when you want it exactly your way.