I grew Recordly to 14K+ stars in 60 days. My thoughts on the future of screen recording:
I grew my open-source app Recordly to 14K stars and tens of thousands of users in less than 60 days at age 16. Here are my thoughts on Screen Studio and the future of the industry.
I wrote all this by hand at 12AM - no AI was used.
In this article, I'll be going over some insights/predictions about the demo recording industry that I've developed after being actively involved for so long. If you're not aware what Recordly is, it's an app for making clean app recordings like you see on X all the time.
Github:https://www.github.com/webadderallorg/recordly
1. The product demo recorder niche will become unprofitable by the end of the year.
Let me explain:
When Recordly launched, there were zero 'polished' free alternatives to Screen Studio, let alone open-source. Let alone PAID, really. Recordly blew up on social media within 24hrs when it launched and maintained a very high growth velocity that it's still on today. For the first time, developers could see the keys to making your own Screen Studio, right on Github. And end users didn't have to pay $29 every month for a screen recorder with zooms.
As a result, we're seeing more and more free Screen Studio alternatives crop up each day. At first, maybe 2-3 a week. Now there's one launching on X every damn day if not faster. And they're all massively better than whatever we had in February, when the market had maybe 3 free Screen Studio alternatives that all looked crappy.
Exponential progress.
The industry also in general shifted towards the 'polished recording' aesthetic. It was interesting seeing the update changelog of many screen recorder businesses after Recordly blew up - for example, Cap rewrote their zoom animation code recently for smoother zooms. It was also kind of amusing seeing many companies add 'AI voiceovers' or '3D perspective' or 'cloud hosting' to their screen recording products, probably to differentiate from open-source competitors. Also, that's probably an omen for the future - I don't think any new demo video recorder launching now will break $1K revenue in the future unless they add AI/cloud features or whatever.
2. It is EASY to make your own Screen Studio with smooth animations!
It's a bloody CRIME how long a polished open-source alternative to Screen Studio took to arise. The smooth motion algorithm Recordly uses is very straightforward - just use spring animations, and then make camera zoom into wherever the cursor is. When cursor moves to outer 25% of frame, recenter camera onto cursor. It is mind boggling how it took 4 years for anything with some semblance to Screen Studio to arise. And this algorithm was VIBE-CODED by me in maybe 30 minutes.
A reason I think explains why: Before, the type of people to develop product demo software were more engineering-minded and less creatively able - after all, the technical moat for developing a screen recorder with a built-in video editor used to be immense. You have to tackle crap like video export on top of video editor architecture and it spirals into its own project. And the analytical type of people who COULD do that couldn't design smooth zooms if their life depended on it.
But now, the foundation is completely open-sourced, and you can add your own features on top with AI. The code moat has evaporated.
3. To be profitable in 2026, product demo recorders will likely shift towards becoming 'video communications' apps like Loom.
Let's face it: for 99% of users of products like Recordly all they give a damn about is exporting their demo video.
If you make that free what's left? Cloud hosting? AI features? If you're making a demo to post on X you don't need either of those.
However, there's two alternative niches that are massively profitable.
They are pivoting to demo software for creators with extensive explainer features, and pivoting to becoming an app centered on sharing professional screen recordings for businesses.
Creators are huge spenders and won't blink at even a $99/year subscription as long as it helps them make content for their channel or whatever. But you need to have your own face on all your marketing material showcasing the explainer features, and you need to be marketing in CONTENT CREATOR SPACES - your indie developer personal brand on X will be useless. I personally believe Screen Studio is pivoting towards this market, and centering their target market around content creators instead of indie devs.
On the other hand, you can choose to become a staple of screen recording software and pivot to communications - think sharable links, comments, enterprise integration, basically Cap or Loom. There is a huge amount of money to be made here, and I am considering pivoting Recordly to this niche. Enterprise subscriptions for screen recorders are pennies to large companies and the value proposition changes from 'export cool files' to 'share clean recordings'. Which is something you will always be able to monetise as it is cloud-based.
Conclusion
So yeah, these are my thoughts on the current state of the product demo recording industry. I believe they're likely to play out.
Who knows, maybe I'll look back on this in 4 months and laugh at how stupid I was.
To sum up:
1. This niche is gonna become unprofitable quite soon because the value is tied up in the code of the product. Which we just open-sourced.
2. Products like Screen Studio are ridiculously easy to code now. We didn't see any good alternatives in the past because you had to be very technical and analytically-minded to tackle the scope of making a video editor + recorder. But that's tackled now, and I hope a wave of creative people shake up this industry now.
3. If you are in this niche and want to be profitable, pivot to either the content creator market or the 'Loom/Cap' video communications market.
Have fun! I'd be very interested to hear what you have to think about my views.