Descript

Editor's Review

Descript is the text editor that happens to edit video — delete a word in the transcript and it vanishes from the footage. Pricing (per person): Free with 60 media minutes/month; Hobbyist $16/month annual ($24 monthly) with 10 media hours; Creator $24/month annual ($35 monthly) with 30 hours and 4K export; Business $50/month annual ($65 monthly) with 40 hours. The September 2025 overhaul introduced the key mechanic: "media minutes" (every uploaded or recorded minute counts against quota, transcribed or not) plus a separate AI-credits meter — and neither rolls over. The 2026 flagship is Underlord, an agentic AI co-editor: conversational editing ("make this feel less like change and more like progress"), auto highlight-clipping for Shorts/Reels/TikTok, SEO show notes. In August–September 2026 Descript raised Underlord's thinking limit and started charging 0.5–1 credit/second for jump-cut smoothing — AI feature costs keep creeping upward. Who should pay? Podcasters and talking-head YouTubers — for dialogue-heavy content, nothing beats the speed of editing words instead of waveforms. Who shouldn't? Anyone doing cinematic work: it's not a real NLE, with no advanced color grading, motion graphics, or frame-accurate visual tools, and transcription errors on accents or crosstalk propagate straight into captions. Versus Adobe Premiere Pro: Descript wins on speed for speech; Premiere wins on everything visual. Versus Podcastle: Podcastle is cheaper and simpler for podcast-only workflows. The media-minute meter punishes multi-file workflows even for footage you never transcribe — budget accordingly.