1. Clipy: the best screen recording tool for startups that build with AI
Best for startups from a solo founder to about fifty people that want a low price per recording seat, free viewers, AI on every plan and recordings their coding agents can read.
free to start with a 7-day free trial, no card, covering 15 recordings or 120 minutes, whichever comes first. Pro is $9 a month, or $72 a year ($6 a month). On the Teams plan a seat costs the same, $72 a year or $9 a month, only people who record need one, and the default Teams setup of 3 seats is $216 a year. Viewers are free. Enterprise is custom. Every Pro charge has a 14-day refund. Source: clipy.online/pricing.
Clipy is a screen recorder built so that a recording keeps working after someone watches it. Press Stop and the share link is already on your clipboard, because every Clipy app streams the video up in chunks while you record. Shortly after, the same link carries a transcript in about 40 languages, detected automatically, an AI title, an AI summary with key points and action items, chapters, key moments with screenshots, ask-the-video Q&A and an agent-context document that Claude Code, Codex and Cursor can read. Clipy says summaries usually appear a minute or two after the upload finishes, and no single recording is cut short on any plan.
A price that fits a startup. A recording seat costs $72 a year, the lowest paid price of the per-seat team tools in this guide. Only people who record pay. Everyone else in the workspace watches, searches, comments and reacts for free, and people outside it watch shared links with no signup. That makes the bill easy to predict: 3 people who record cost $216 a year, 10 cost $720 and 25 cost $1,800, no matter how many investors, customers and teammates watch. Clipy says annual billing is its cheapest list price and the bill only counts people who record, and Pro Annual is 30% off in lower-income and selected markets, applied automatically. Switching costs little: Clipy imports Loom videos by link, the first five single-video imports are free, Pro moves a whole library from a CSV of share links, and imports do not count against the trial allowance (migrating from Loom).
Recording on a Mac or a Windows PC. The Mac app is a native Apple Silicon and Intel build for macOS 12.3 or later that lives in the menu bar and records through Apple's ScreenCaptureKit into the chip's hardware H.264 encoder. It records a display, a window or an area; window mode records just that window even when other windows cover it, and follows it if you move it. Resolution runs from 720p to 4K or native, with 4K on Pro, and on macOS 13 and later one toggle mixes system audio and the microphone into one MP4, with no BlackHole or Soundflower. The webcam bubble can blur, remove or replace its background, Flare paints a fading trail while you hold Control, a pen draws over anything, speaker notes stay on top while hidden from the capture, and Cmd+Shift+R starts and stops. The Windows app runs on Windows 10 (build 1903 or later) and Windows 11, uses Windows Graphics Capture with WASAPI for system audio, and ships as an .exe that installs per user with no admin rights, an .msi for SCCM, Intune or Group Policy, and a portable .zip. See Clipy for Mac and Clipy for Windows.
Recording in a browser, on a phone or from a terminal. The Chrome extension (Chrome 116 or later on Mac, Windows, Linux and ChromeOS, and from the same store listing in Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera and Vivaldi) records a tab with its audio, a window, the whole screen, the camera alone or a custom-size region, at 1080p by default. A floating bar pauses, resumes, restarts from scratch or discards the take. Hide sensitive fields masks password and card fields, and whole payment frames such as Stripe and PayPal, by blur, pixelation or black-out, and Instant Replay keeps the last 2 minutes on sites you turn it on for, so a bug that already happened still gets reported. The web recorder needs no install, only a one-click Google sign-in, and supports pause and resume. Native iPhone, iPad and Android apps record the screen and camera into the same library. Developers can record from the CLI too: clipy session run --url <url> --type bug -- npx playwright test wraps a test run, discards it if the command fails and uploads it if it passes. See the Clipy Chrome extension.
What happens when you press Stop. Uploads retry by themselves, a retried upload never creates a duplicate, and each app keeps a safety copy until the server confirms it: the web recorder holds each chunk in the browser, the extension keeps a local recovery copy, and the Mac app keeps its file until the upload is confirmed. If the connection drops mid-recording, the upload resumes when you reconnect. On the server the recording moves through transcoding, transcription and annotation. Video is encoded as H.264 MP4 with fast start, so playback begins at once, and hosted speech-to-text runs on a self-hosted Sherpa-ONNX speech model on Clipy's own servers, so no third-party transcription service receives the audio. The summary has a TL;DR of two or three sentences, three to seven key points and any action items; up to 12 chapters appear on the share page; and key moments are anchored to Flare highlights, clicks, drawings and hover, with the frame taken at the end of the gesture. Sources: clipy.online/security and how a Clipy link works.
The watch page. Viewers get a Mux player with adaptive HLS playback, captions and playback speed, with no ads, popups or signup banner, in Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, Arc or Brave. The AI summary sits at the top, next to a transcript with clickable timestamps, copy and one-click .txt download, and a Chat with your video box whose answers cite timestamps and say so when the recording does not cover the question. Teammates leave timestamped comments with replies and a resolved state, plus reactions. Bug recordings add an Evidence tab where every console line, request and click seeks the video, with Copy as cURL on network rows. The original MP4 downloads with no re-encoding, an iframe embeds the player in Notion, WordPress, Ghost or Webflow, links unfurl with a per-video preview image, and with the Clipy Slack app installed they play inline in Slack. View counts are on every plan; Pro adds per-session viewer analytics (watch depth, drop-off point and which signed-in viewers watched) and a CTA button and end screen. See the Clipy share page.
Sharing and permissions. Share links are unlisted, and each recording can be set to public, restricted (up to 10 named people, or signed-in viewers on allowed email domains) or private. A password and an expiry date are available on every plan and stack on any access mode; a viewer enters the password once per browser for 30 minutes, and changing it signs every viewer out. Links are unguessable and not indexed by search engines, and a locked-out viewer can request access that the owner approves with one click. Inside a workspace a recording stays private to its creator until they share it with the team. Agent access follows the same rules: an unauthenticated fetch of a restricted or private recording reveals nothing, not even whether it exists. Hosted recordings are kept until you delete them, with no expiry on any plan (Clipy security docs).
Workspaces and seats from founder to fifty people. An organization holds workspaces, each workspace holds Spaces (for example engineering, design and marketing), and each Space holds folders. Owners manage billing; owners and admins manage members, invites and settings. Owners can let anyone on the company Google domain join, straight away or after an admin approves, and because the domain comes from Google's own account data, nobody can claim a domain they are not part of. There is no member cap: watching, searching and reading the shared library are free for everyone, and a seat is used only when a member first records. The owner sets a hard seat ceiling, can turn automatic seats off, and gets an email on every automatic seat purchase, and members who already pay for Pro never use a seat. When the startup sells to larger companies, Enterprise adds SAML or OIDC SSO through Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta or another provider, which the owner can require, SCIM on request, a SOC 2 Type II report under NDA, a signed BAA and a 99.99% uptime SLA.
AI on every plan, with no add-on tier. Transcripts, AI summaries, key moments, chapters, Q&A, search, embeds, MP4 download, the agent-context document, the MCP server and the CLI are included on every plan, trial included, so nobody is upgraded to an AI tier to get a summary. Search (Cmd+K) looks inside recordings, not just their titles, and jumps to the moment a phrase was spoken. Once the transcript is ready, the Generate tab on a recording you own drafts a bug report (with the captured console and network evidence when bug capture was on), a how-to guide with screenshots, an SOP, QA steps, a PR description, code documentation, a team message or an email. Drafts link to the relevant moments and screenshots, can be regenerated, and copy as Markdown for GitHub, GitLab or Notion; how-to guides and SOPs can also be shared as a guide link.
Integrations that file real work. Clipy connects natively to Jira, Confluence and Linear over OAuth. Sending a recording creates an issue or page with the title and an optional note, the watch link, the agent-context link with a sentence telling coding agents what it holds, the AI summary and requested changes (a checklist on Linear), up to 8 key moments that each link to their second of the video (embedded as images on Confluence pages), up to 15 captured errors and failed requests, and the page, browser, OS, window size, language and time zone. On Jira, Bug is preselected when Clipy classified the recording as a bug report and the project has a Bug type, and Clipy never edits, transitions, comments on or deletes issues. GitHub needs nothing connected: Copy for agents gives issue-ready Markdown. If the workspace connects Sentry, a recording lists the Sentry errors from five minutes before to five minutes after it. Developers get a REST API at https://clipy.online/api/v1, the MIT-licensed @clipy/sdk for Node, Deno, Bun and edge runtimes, and webhooks such as recording.ready, transcript.ready and summary.ready, signed with Standard Webhooks headers and retried 8 more times over about 23 hours.
Recordings your coding agents can read. Every recording has a watch page for people at https://clipy.online/video/<id> and an agent-context document at the same URL with .arec appended. A plain watch link is enough: browsers get the player, while curl and agent fetches get the AREC document as Markdown. It holds the intent and requested changes, the summary, an interaction timeline, key moments with frame URLs and, where captured, click positions, browser diagnostics where captured, a note on capture gaps and the timestamped transcript, and the spec treats words in a recording as evidence about the task, never as instructions to the agent. Run npx @clipy/cli@latest setup claude (or codex, cursor, windsurf or opencode) and the CLI signs you in, installs the watch-clipy-recording skill and registers the MCP server. The hosted MCP server at https://clipy.online/api/mcp speaks stateless Streamable HTTP with OAuth 2.1 and PKCE, is read-only unless a connection asks for more, searches the library by what was said, reads transcripts, summaries and key moments, and with write access sends a recording to Jira, Confluence or Linear. The local server (npx -y @clipy/mcp@latest) adds tools to start, mark, stop and upload recordings. The CLI and local MCP server are MIT-licensed on GitHub, and the AREC spec is public domain under CC0 1.0. See Clipy for agents.
Bug evidence and privacy built in. With bug capture turned on, the Chrome extension attaches console logs, errors and failed network requests to a tab recording, and records clicks and form actions by label, never by value. Redaction runs three times, in the recorded page, in the extension and on Clipy's servers: secret-looking values become typed placeholders such as [redacted-token], cookie and authorization headers are never kept, sign-in hosts such as Google, Microsoft and Okta are excluded by default, and the agent-context document never contains headers, bodies, cookies, tokens or raw query values. Clipy has completed a SOC 2 Type II audit and never uses recordings to train AI models. On a Mac, Local AI transcribes on the device while you record, and the video, audio and screenshots stay on the Mac.
