I spent six months building a video product.
Today, one tweet made me question our moat.
Thanks a lot,
@fframes_rust 😂
Seriously, impressive tool. Free and open source. We compared the codebases, and we weren't all that happy with the results of the analysis.
It’s a strange feeling to admire somebody’s work while wondering how much of your sales pitch just disappeared.
I doubt I’m the only builder having this moment. You spend months making something, then discover someone else is giving a strong alternative away. And you can’t even be mad at them. They built something good.
The part that keeps bothering me is how quickly someone could close whatever gap remains.
With these models improving so rapidly, I keep wondering how much of our six months someone could reproduce in a day, starting with nothing but the product description. Not claiming they could recreate the whole thing. But how close would they need to get?
They wouldn’t even need our code.
Free alternatives aren’t new. I’m questioning how much time a technical head start buys you now.
We’re not killing ForgeVideo. It still handles things that matter when you’re actually finishing a video: replacing a shot without disturbing approved scenes or the soundtrack, and reusing unaffected render work instead of starting over. Those differences become useful when you’re five revisions in and almost everything is right.
We’ll keep improving it. We may even incorporate FFrames’ renderer, which would be a pretty good outcome from a tweet that initially ruined my afternoon.
greyforge.tech/forgevideo
For people selling software: when a strong free alternative showed up, what actually kept customers choosing yours?