tondi for agencies and production studios

Checked against v1.1.5, 18 October 2026.

The question an agency asks about an AI clipper is usually not whether the clips are good. It is where the client's footage ends up, who else has a copy, and what has to be declared to whom. tondi's answer is that the footage does not go anywhere: transcription, choosing the moments and rendering all happen on the Mac in front of you.

Why "no upload" is a procurement question, not a feature

When you put client footage through a cloud clipper, you have added a company to the list of people holding that material. Depending on the contract, that can mean a sub-processor to disclose, a data-processing agreement to get signed, a security questionnaire to fill in, or a clause in the master services agreement that simply does not allow it. Sometimes it means asking the client for permission you would rather not have to ask for.

tondi removes the question rather than answering it. The app talks to tondi.app to sign you in and to check whether the subscription is active, and it fetches a transcription model once from huggingface.co on first run. None of those calls carries your video, your audio or your transcript. The privacy policy lists every connection the app makes, and what a cloud clipper's terms actually say about retention is set out separately, quoted and dated.

Your contracts are yours to read, and nothing here is legal advice. This page describes what the software does so you can check it against what your agreements require.

What an IT reviewer will want to know

Question	Answer
Is it signed?	Yes — signed and notarized by Apple, Developer ID team DHN5QUUM7B. macOS opens it without a warning.
What does it send?	Sign-in and a subscription check to tondi.app. One model download from huggingface.co, once per accuracy tier. Nothing else.
Does footage leave the machine?	No. There is no upload step in the app.
Does it work offline?	Yes, once the model is downloaded. Clipping needs no connection after that.
Where do files land?	The folder you choose. A `transcript.json` sits beside the clips so a second run skips transcription; delete the folder and it is gone.
Is there content telemetry?	No. Nothing about the video, the audio or the transcript is reported.
What does it need?	Apple Silicon (M1 or later), macOS 13 or later. Full requirements.

Several clients on one machine

There is no cloud project list to keep tidy and nothing is pooled. Each run writes to the folder you name, so a client folder or a mounted share works the way any other export does. The History tab that plays back previous runs reads from those folders on your own disk; it is not a hosted library, and there is no shared workspace that one client's material could appear in by accident.

Deliverables are ordinary H.264 mp4 files named by shape — 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 and 16:9 can come out of a single run. On Pro there is no watermark and nothing in the file names identifies tondi, so what you hand over looks like what you made.

What it costs at agency volume

Cloud clippers bill per minute of source footage. Agencies have a lot of source footage, so the two pricing models pull apart quickly. Twenty hours of rushes a month is 1,200 minutes:

1,200 minutes of source a month	tondi	Per-minute cloud pricing
One editor	$10 / month	Four times the largest listed Opus Clip plan; in practice a custom Business quote
Three editors	$30 / month ($360 / year)	Seats plus minutes, both scaling
A 3-hour shoot arrives late on Friday	No change	180 minutes off the allowance

Sales tax, VAT or GST is added at checkout based on where you are. Stripe is the merchant of record for the purchase, so the receipt comes from Link and the charge appears on a statement as LINK.COM* tondi — worth knowing before someone in accounts queries it. Cancelling stops the next renewal and Pro runs to the end of the period already paid for, and there is a 14-day refund. The details are on pricing.

The licence, and how many people it covers

The terms grant "a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use the app on Macs you own or control, for personal or commercial work". Two things follow from that, and it is better to be blunt about both.

It covers paid client work. Commercial use is explicitly included, and clips you make are yours — tondi claims nothing over them.

It follows a person, not a company. One subscription is for one editor, who can sign in on the Macs they work on — a laptop and a studio machine, say. Three editors need three subscriptions. There is no seat pricing, no volume discount and no team tier; the pricing page says the same thing. At $10 each that is usually still less than per-minute cloud billing for one of them, but it is three transactions rather than one invoice.

Where tondi is the wrong choice for an agency

Stated plainly, because these are the things that will decide it:

Windows or Intel machines. Apple Silicon only. If any part of the team is not on an M-series Mac, this is settled before anything else matters.
No central administration. No SSO, no admin console, no consolidated billing, no audit log, no way to see what the team exported. Each subscription is independent.
No shared review space. Client approval rounds happen wherever you already do them. tondi makes files; it does not host a link for a client to comment on.
No speaker tracking. A vertical clip shows the whole widescreen frame over a blurred copy of itself. For a single presenter that reads well; for a wide two-shot interview, a tool that crops to whoever is talking will look tighter.
No URL import, no scheduling, no B-roll generation. It works from a file on disk and produces files on disk.
English first. Other languages are transcribed and captioned, but the hook-word signals used to rank moments are English. How it picks.

Trying it on one project

Free needs no account and no card, and gives three clips per video with a small watermark — enough to judge the only thing that really matters, which is whether it picks the right moments.

Use a project you have already delivered. You know which moments the client chose and which ones performed, so you can grade the output against something real.
Run it on the machine the footage already lives on. That is the whole point; copying the file somewhere first defeats the test.
Check the timing on your own hardware. On an M3 MacBook Air with 16 GB, a 58-minute 1080p episode took 6 minutes 25 seconds at the Standard tier, measured on 12 September 2026. Longer files scale roughly in proportion.
Then take one month of Pro for the real test: no watermark, up to 10 clips a video, and batch mode for a backlog.

Common questions

Can we use tondi for paid client work?

Yes. The licence covers commercial work on Macs you own or control, and the clips are yours; tondi claims nothing over them.

Can three editors share one Pro subscription?

No. The licence is personal and non-transferable, so each editor needs their own. One subscription does cover the Macs that one person works on.

Will you sign an NDA or a data-processing agreement?

Because the footage never reaches tondi, there is usually no processing for a DPA to cover — which is the useful answer for most questionnaires. If a client's paperwork still needs something in writing, email support@tondi.app and say what is required.

Can we get one invoice for the whole team?

Not today. Each subscription is bought and billed separately through Stripe, which issues the receipt. There is no consolidated multi-seat invoice.

Does anything identify tondi in what we deliver?

On Pro, no — no watermark, and nothing in the file names. On Free, a small tondi mark is burned into every export.

What happens to our clips if we stop paying?

Nothing. They are mp4 files in folders on your own disks. The app returns to Free limits; the work you have already exported is unaffected.

Try it on one client project

Free to use, no account needed. Apple Silicon Macs only.

Download tondi