Frequently asked questions

Recording, editing, and previewing are free with no limit. Free exports carry a small "Made with Glidesmith" mark in the corner and stop at the first 2 minutes. A one-time licence, from $29, removes both for good on the Macs it covers. There is no subscription.

No. Capture, editing, and export all run on your Mac. There is no account and no cloud processing. The app goes online for two things only: activating and checking a licence key with Polar, our payment provider, and fetching in-app announcements from glidesmith.com. You can verify that with a network monitor such as Little Snitch.

No. For on-screen shortcut callouts it records keyboard shortcuts made with Command, Control or Option (such as ⌘S), and keys that type nothing, such as Return, Tab, arrows and function keys. It never records a letter, number or symbol on its own, or with only Shift held. The event log cannot reconstruct typed text, including passwords typed on camera. This is enforced in the app and covered by a test that is never skipped.

While you record, Glidesmith logs where you click on the same timeline as the video. It then plans eased zooms toward those clicks, merges clicks that land close together into a single zoom, and moves the camera with a spring so it never snaps. Every zoom is a block on the timeline you can move, resize, retarget, or delete.

macOS Ventura 13.1 and later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel. Capture uses ScreenCaptureKit and export uses Apple's hardware encoder through VideoToolbox, so it runs natively on either chip.

MP4 or MOV with H.264, up to 4K at 60 fps, through the Mac's hardware encoder. Export presets cover 4K60, 1080p60, 1080p30 and 720p, plus crop shapes for 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 4:5 and 9:16. GIF export with a size estimate is in progress.

Screen Recording, so it can capture your screen, and Accessibility, so it can see where you click. Microphone access is asked for only if you record your voice. Glidesmith explains each one before macOS asks.

Loom is built around hosted share links and accounts. Glidesmith has neither: you get a file on your Mac. Compared with other local recorders, the focus is a lower one-time price and, next, AI cutting that runs entirely on your machine instead of on a server.

You choose at checkout: 1, 3, 5 or 10 Macs, from $29 for one. Each licence is a key you paste into Settings, and you can deactivate a Mac from the customer portal to move the key to a new one.

Use the contact page. We read every message and reply within 24 hours on business days, whether it is a bug report, a feature request, or a licence question.