Reviews with
the numbers
attached.
Most "best tools" lists are written by people who never ran a channel. Every review here comes from weeks of real use on our own four channels.
LATEST RECEIPTS
- Nº 15 The database that runs my channels: Notion as a video production tracker2026-10-07 →
40 uploads tracked, every title pattern tagged, every experiment queryable. How a simple Notion database became the memory that makes my automation smarter.
- Nº 14 My writers' room is one AI: how Claude scripts 4 channels (including this site)2026-10-06 →
Every script across my four channels goes through Claude, under per-channel rulebooks that took months to build. What that workflow looks like, what it costs, and what it can't do.
- Nº 13 Higgsfield after 6 documentaries: the only tool I actually pay for2026-10-02 →
Every visual on my space channel comes from Higgsfield's AI generation. A real-use review from 24 shipped videos: the workflow, the credit economics, and where it still fights me.
- Nº 12 What running 4 YouTube channels actually costs me per month2026-09-30 →
The full monthly bill behind 85+ videos across four channels, line by line. Spoiler: the editing costs nothing, and the one real expense buys pixels, not time.
- Nº 11 The day my automation got a video 0% feed exposure2026-09-28 →
Automation made publishing fast, and publishing fast is how I hit YouTube's duplicate detection. The full incident report: what happened, why, and the rules now hard-coded into my pipeline.
- Nº 10 One documentary in, three shorts out: my long-form recut pipeline2026-09-27 →
18 shorts came from 6 long-form videos on my space channel. Here is the recut workflow, what it costs (nothing), and where automated repurposing actually breaks.
- Nº 09 Yes, this automates 25-minute videos too: my long-form space channel pipeline2026-09-24 →
Shorts automation is common. Here is how the same draft-file approach assembles 25-minute English documentaries, plus the thumbnail experiment that failed.
- Nº 08 Raw footage in, rough cut out: the silence-cutting half of my pipeline2026-09-21 →
The lesser-known second mode of my CapCut automation: it removes silence and stumbles from filmed footage and generates subtitles before I ever open the editor.
- Nº 07 I tested 7 title styles across 40+ shorts. Three got banned from my own channel2026-09-17 →
A structured hook experiment on a real animal shorts channel: which title patterns kept retention above 70%, which flatlined, and the receipts for each.
- Nº 06 My automated subtitle system, and the 59.9% problem it hasn't fixed2026-09-14 →
Every short gets styled, word-wrapped subtitles with zero manual work. Here is how that works, and an honest look at the swipe-away metric that automation can't solve.
- Nº 05 How my shorts always land at 15-20 seconds without me editing anything2026-09-09 →
Shorts length is a retention decision. Here is the auto-fit trick in my pipeline that makes every video land in the window, and the numbers behind the window itself.
- Nº 04 The $0 TTS setup behind 60+ of my YouTube shorts2026-09-07 →
I voice every short with free Microsoft Edge neural TTS instead of a paid subscription. Setup, the auto-length trick, honest limits, and what it saves.
- Nº 03 Inside CapCut's draft files: how automation works without an API2026-09-06 →
CapCut saves every project as editable JSON on your disk. Here is how those draft files are structured and how my Python pipeline writes them directly.
- Nº 02 CapCut has no API. I automated it anyway and shipped 85+ videos2026-09-01 →
CapCut offers no official automation. Here is the Python pipeline I built around its draft files, the real numbers from 4 channels, and the day it backfired.
- Nº 01 Why this site exists (and what a 'receipt' means here)2026-08-26 →
Most creator-tool reviews are written by people who never ran a channel. We run four, and we publish our own numbers first.