case study — running now
Paste a YouTube URL, get 10 viral-ready clips — a monetized SaaS with real paying customers.
Clipping long-form video into shorts is a manual editing grind, and the existing tools (Opus Clip, Vidyo.ai) jitter the crop every time a speaker leans sideways.
built for — Creators — built, shipped, and monetized as a solo product.
“A product is not a demo until a stranger pays for it.”
YouTube aggressively blocks datacenter downloads. ClipForge runs a bgutil PO-token server plus live Chromium cookies — zero bot blocks in production.
Whisper large-v3 transcription feeds an LLM highlight scorer that picks up to 10 segments with hook potential.
YOLOv8 tracks the speaker, but the crop only moves when they exit a 60% safe zone — a dead-zone algorithm that kills the micro-jitter competitors have.
FFmpeg renders karaoke captions and 9:16 reframes; Lemon Squeezy webhooks gate plan limits; OAuth uploads straight to the user’s channel.
Datacenter IPs get download requests blocked — the product dies at step one.
resolutionSolved at infrastructure level: a bgutil PO-token server plus live Chromium cookie harvesting. Zero bot blocks in production.
Naive per-frame tracking produces a crop that twitches with every head movement — the tell of cheap AI clipping tools.
resolutionA dead-zone lazy-pan algorithm: the crop holds still until the speaker exits a 60% safe zone, then eases. Outperforms Opus Clip and Vidyo.ai on micro-jitter.
Payments are where side projects quietly break: renewals, cancellations, plan changes, webhook replays.
resolutionA webhook handler that treats Lemon Squeezy events as the source of truth, with idempotent processing across Monthly/Annual variants.
Live and monetized at clipforging.com — real paid conversion, not a waitlist.
Up to 10 clips per video with karaoke captions and speaker-tracked framing.
Zero bot blocks in production since the PO-token infrastructure shipped.
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