Every other tool in this category runs the render on their servers. We do not, and it is worth explaining why, because the decision shapes everything else about how Scaldeo works.
The quota is per account, not per request
Image generation is metered against the Google account that requests it. If we ran generation centrally, every customer would be drawing from one pool. The first heavy user each day would exhaust it and everyone after them would be told to come back tomorrow.
That is not a scaling problem you can spend your way out of. It is a property of how the quota is issued.
A hosted renderer would have shared one daily limit across every customer on the platform.
Datacentre traffic gets flagged
The second reason is duller and just as decisive. Generation driven from a datacentre IP attracts anti-abuse measures quickly. Driven from your own browser, with your own session, it looks like exactly what it is.
What you get from the trade
- Your footage, images and voiceovers never leave your disk. There is no upload step because there is nothing to upload.
- No queue. Your render is limited by your own machine, not by how many other customers pressed go first.
- No per-minute rendering charge, because we are not paying for the compute.
- You can unplug from the internet mid-render and the render finishes.
What it costs you
Honesty matters more than polish here. You have to install something, and you have to bring your own API keys — which means creating accounts before your first video. That is real friction and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What you get for it is a tool with no meter running.