Planned launch pricing

One flat price. No meters.

Rooster is in active development and has not been released, so nothing below is on sale yet. These are the prices we plan to launch with, published now so that anyone deciding whether to wait for Rooster can decide with the numbers in front of them.

• Monthly

  $9.99

  a month, planned launch pricing

  The straightforward way in. Everything Rooster does, billed monthly, with nothing metered behind it.

  • Unmetered
  • 7-day free trial planned
  • Mac App Store or direct

• Annual

  $69.99

  a year, planned launch pricing

  About $5.83 a month, roughly 42 per cent off the monthly price for paying a year up front.

  • Unmetered
  • 7-day free trial planned
  • Mac App Store or direct

• Lifetime licence

  Announced at launch

  one payment, price announced at launch

  Lifetime access to a named tier: that tier's feature set plus its updates, rather than everything Rooster ever ships.

  • Unmetered
  • Sold on the direct download
  • And as a one-off Mac App Store purchase

Every paid tier is unmetered, and a seven-day free trial with a payment method required is planned on the monthly and annual subscriptions. Prices are in US dollars and are what we intend to launch with; they are not a purchase you can make today.

What unmetered means

Three things that exist in most video tools do not exist here, and the reason is the same in all three cases: the work runs on your Mac, so your usage costs us nothing, so there is nothing on our side to meter.

• No media minutes. Record and import as much as you like. There is no monthly pool of hours that retakes, alternate angles and footage you end up cutting all draw down.
• No AI credits. Transcription, Studio Sound, Eye Contact and Green Screen run on your own processor and Neural Engine. Nothing about running them costs us a per-action fee, so nothing about running them costs you a credit.
• No top-ups and no overage maths. Nothing can run out in the middle of a project, so there is no mid-edit purchase to make and no arithmetic to do before you press record.

That is why unmetered is a structural claim rather than a promotion. It is not generosity that could be repriced next September: it is what follows from not running servers on your behalf. The how it works page sets out what runs where, including the short list of things that genuinely use the network.

How this compares

Descript is the tool most people arrive here from, so it is the useful comparison. Its figures below are the ones our pricing post checked against Descript’s published pages on 14 August 2026; the annual column is the per-month cost when billed for a year up front.

Descript figures checked 14 August 2026 and dated as such; what each meter counts, and what happens when one runs out, is broken down in our Descript pricing post. Descript can change its pricing at any time. Rooster’s figures are planned launch pricing for a product that has not shipped.

What stays yours

Your projects are files on your Mac, and there is no account standing between you and your own work. A lapsed subscriber always keeps their projects and their exported media: they are ordinary files in ordinary folders, not rows in a database we hold. Exports go to your Downloads folder by default and never silently overwrite something already there, and your original recordings are never rewritten.

Exactly what a lapsed subscription can still do inside the application is being decided before launch, and it will be stated plainly in the App Store listing rather than discovered afterwards.