CaptionBolt Is Live — Here's What We Built and Why

We shipped. CaptionBolt is live.

I've been sitting on this post for a week because I kept wanting to add "one more thing" before announcing. But at some point you just have to push it out and let people use it.

The Problem We Kept Running Into

My co-founder and I make short-form video content. Not as a job — as a side thing for our other projects. And every single time, the caption workflow was the same pain:

1. Open CapCut (or Premiere, or DaVinci)
2. Import the video
3. Wait for auto-transcription
4. Manually fix timing issues
5. Try to make captions look good
6. Give up and use the default style
7. Export

That's 10-15 minutes per video. For captions. Which should take 30 seconds.

So we built CaptionBolt. Three steps: upload your video, pick a caption style, download. Done. That simple flow eventually became our auto subtitle generator, but the beta started with the smallest useful version we could ship.

What's in the Beta

Right now you get:

• 10 caption styles — we focused on the styles creators actually use on TikTok and Reels. Bold uppercase, word-by-word animations, that kind of thing.
• AI transcription — powered by Whisper. It's not perfect on every accent, but it's solid for English and most Latin-script languages.
• MP4 export — captions are burned into the video. Download and post directly.

That's it. No timeline editor, no color grading, no transitions. We do one thing.

What's Not Great Yet

Being honest:

• The processing speed is okay but not fast. A 3-minute video takes about 40 seconds. We're working on this.
• Only 10 styles. We have a backlog of 50+ that we're building out.
• The transcription sometimes splits words at weird points. Like it'll put "break" on one line and "fast" on the next when "breakfast" is one word. We know. We're fixing it.
• No SRT export yet. If you need a subtitle file for Premiere, you'll have to wait a bit.

What's Next

We're heads-down on two things:

1. More styles. We want 50+ by end of year. We're studying what top creators actually use — not what looks cool in a mockup, but what performs in the feed.
2. Better segmentation. The way captions break into lines matters a lot more than people think. "I went to the" / "store yesterday" reads terribly. We're building a smarter algorithm for this.

Try It

Free accounts get 5 minutes of video per month. There's a small watermark on free exports, but the caption quality is identical to what paying users get.

If you make short-form content and you're tired of the caption grind, give it a shot. We'd genuinely love your feedback — we're a two-person team and we read every message.

Where to Go Next

If you're reading this later and want the current version of the workflow, start with the auto subtitle generator, the video transcription tool, or the longer story on why we built CaptionBolt. The pricing page has the current plans.