ABOUT
Your video editor should not need your video.
Every serious AI video tool asks you to upload your footage to a stranger's computer and pay rent for the privilege. Zella does the same work without either. It runs on the device in your hands, and you buy it once.
Test the claim before you trust it
Companies say "we respect your privacy" and you have no way to check. So here is a version you can check, in about ten seconds:
Put your Mac or iPhone in airplane mode. Record a video. Generate the captions. Remove the background. Clean up your voice. Export the finished file.
All of it still works, because none of it was ever going anywhere. There is no upload step, no render queue on a server you cannot see, and no account, which means there is no profile of you to build in the first place.
Three things genuinely touch the internet, and since the sentence after this one claims we would rather tell you than have you find out, here they are in full. The captions model downloads once, on first use. Auto B-Roll searches a free stock library, sending a single keyword taken from your captions. The AI Assistant, if you add your own provider key, sends your typed prompt and a short summary of the project - clip counts, durations, caption text, effect settings - so it can work out which edit you meant. Your video and audio never leave the device in any of the three. The full detail is in the privacy policy.
Why this exists
Zella did not start as a business idea. It started as a person who kept not shipping.
Nasir built his career in SEO, AI and marketing, and was never short on things to make. Every one of them hit the same wall: the recording was fine, and turning it into something worth posting took a whole evening. Import here, cut there, retype the captions, re-crop for the platform that wants a different shape, discover the audio is quiet, start again. Like most people who are not editors, he lost more ideas to that wall than to any lack of them.
The tools that solved it wanted a subscription and an upload. The tools that respected your files wanted you to already know how to edit. Nothing did the boring part and left the footage alone.
So Zella does the boring part. You record, you tap once, and it cuts the silences, removes the filler words, writes and styles the captions, cleans the voice and scores the thing. You never open a timeline unless you want to - and when you do want to, the whole editor is there and none of it is behind a paywall.
What we believe
- Your files are yours. On-device is not a feature, it is the premise.
- Software you buy should keep working. No rug-pulls, no paywalls creeping in.
- Native beats Electron. Speed is a feature you feel every single day.
- The best edit is the one the app already did, so you can go and post it.
- A free tier that is designed to annoy you is an advert, not a free tier.
How Zella makes money
By selling software. That is the whole model, and it is worth saying plainly because most of this category runs on something else.
Zella Free is the complete editor and every AI feature, with unlimited recording and no watermark. It is capped only on export: 2 minutes, at up to 1080p. 1080p is free forever. Zella Pro is $89 once and lifts both ceilings. Founder is $299 once. Both are Apple Universal Purchases, so one payment covers your Mac and your iPhone.
Every new install also gets Pro Week: the complete Pro feature set for seven days, with no card, no account and nothing to cancel. On day eight it becomes the free tier again, and the free tier is genuinely usable, which is the point.
There are no ads, no analytics sold on, and no data to sell even if we wanted to. The full pricing page shows exactly what sits in each tier.
What Zella will never do
These are commitments, not aspirations. They are written to be specific enough that you could catch us breaking them.
Your footage never leaves your device
No upload, no cloud render queue, no account. Not "encrypted in transit" - simply never sent. The only exception is Auto B-Roll, which sends a single keyword to a stock library to find a clip, and never your video.
No subscription, ever
Zella Pro is $89 once and Founder is $299 once. If we ever ship a subscription tier, it will be alongside the one-time licence you already own, never in place of it.
No watermark, on any tier
A free export comes out clean. Watermarking the free tier is the most obvious growth lever in this category and we are not going to pull it. If you ever see a Zella stamp on an export, that is a bug and we want the report.
The free tier will not shrink
Free is the complete editor, every AI feature, unlimited recording, and export up to 2 minutes at 1080p. Features move out of Pro and into Free sometimes. They do not move the other way.
No ads, no tracking, no data to sell
There is nothing to sell, because nothing is collected. The app has no account system, so there is no profile of you to build in the first place.
It keeps working
A one-time purchase that stops working when a server is switched off was never a purchase. Zella has no licence server to phone home to and no kill switch to trip.
Who builds Zella
One person, on the same Mac and iPhone it was built to fix. That has a real downside worth stating: there is no overnight support rota and no team to escalate to. It also has an upside you will notice the first time you report something, which is that the person reading it is the person who can fix it, and there is nobody to route you to.
Most support happens in the open, in the Zella Community on Facebook, where you can also read what everyone else has already asked.