Planned launch pricing

One flat Rooster price. No media-minute limits.

Rooster is in closed beta and has not gone on sale. 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

  $12.99

  a month, planned launch pricing

  The straightforward way in. Everything Rooster does, billed monthly. The price stays flat however much you edit.

  • No media-minute limits
  • 14-day free trial planned
  • Direct download at launch

• Annual

  $99

  a year, planned launch pricing

  $8.25 a month, billed annually - about 36 per cent off paying month to month.

  • No media-minute limits
  • 14-day free trial planned
  • Direct download at launch

• Lifetime licence

  $249

  one payment, planned launch pricing

  One payment, and the licence itself never expires. About two and a half years of the annual price, with a year of updates included.

  • No media-minute limits
  • 12 months of updates included
  • Direct download only

Every paid tier has no media-minute limit, and a 14-day free trial is planned: the whole application, no watermark on what you export, with a payment method required to start it. There is no free tier. Prices are in US dollars and are what we intend to launch with; they are not a purchase you can make today.

The first release is a direct download from this site. A Mac App Store build is planned to follow it, carrying the monthly and annual subscriptions; the lifetime licence is sold here and only here.

What the lifetime licence includes

Rooster itself, permanently. The licence does not expire and there is no renewal to miss: the version you own keeps opening your projects and exporting your work for as long as you have a Mac to run it on.

Updates are the part worth reading carefully, because “lifetime” is used loosely in this category. 12 months of updates are included from the day you buy. After that you can renew to keep receiving them, and if you do not, nothing is taken away - you stay on the version you have, working exactly as it did. We would rather say that plainly now than have it discovered in year two.

What unmetered means

No media-minute limits. No top-ups. No overage maths. Your Rooster bill won’t grow with your workload.

• 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 Rooster usage charges. Use local transcription, Studio Sound, Eye Contact and Green Screen as often as you need.
• No top-ups and no overage maths. Rooster will not stop you in the middle of a project and ask you to buy more usage.

Optional cloud services use your own account and are billed separately.

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.

What a lapsed subscription can still do is settled, and it is this: the application drops to read-only. Every project still opens and every file you already exported is untouched, but editing and export are locked until the subscription is current again. Resubscribing restores it; nothing is deleted in the meantime. A lifetime licence never lapses, so none of this applies to it.