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Terms & Conditions

These terms are the agreement between you and FirstCut. We've written them in plain language, because a rule you can't read isn't one you agreed to.

Last updated: 15 September 2026

1. The agreement

By using FirstCut — the site at firstcut.video and the app behind it — you accept these terms. If you don't accept them, don't use the service. If you're using FirstCut for an employer or a client, you confirm you're allowed to accept these terms on their behalf, and “you” means both of you.

FirstCut is operated by Eran Strassburg, a sole trader registered in Israel. In these terms, “we”, “us” and “our” mean that operator, and the agreement is between you and them. Full contact details are in section 18, and there's more about who builds this on the about page.

You need to be at least 16 years old, or the age of digital consent where you live if that's higher.

These terms sit alongside the privacy summary, which describes what we store and what never leaves your machine.

2. Your account

You can start working without signing in — an anonymous session is created for you, and everything you make lives under it. If you later sign in with Google or a passwordless email link, that work is merged into the account you sign in to.

• An anonymous session is only as durable as the browser holding it. Clear your site data, switch browsers, or use a private window, and the work behind it may be unreachable. Signing in is what makes it durable.
• Keep control of the email address or Google account you sign in with. Whoever can receive a sign-in link can reach your work.
• One account is for one person. Don't share credentials, and don't resell access.

3. Your footage and your content

You own your content — your source video, its audio, the transcripts made from it, the briefs you write, and the sequences you build. Nothing here transfers ownership of any of it to us, and we claim no rights in the films you make.

You're responsible for having the rights to the footage you bring: you either own it or have permission to use it, including from the people appearing and speaking in it.

4. What you give us permission to do

To run and improve the service, you grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide licence to host, store, and process the content you send us — and only the content you actually send us:

• The extracted audio track, which your browser pulls out of your video locally and uploads. We store it and pass it to a transcription provider to produce your transcript.
• Your transcripts, briefs, and sequences, which we store so you can reopen them, and pass to an AI provider when you ask for a cut or a revision.

Your video files are never uploaded. The picture stays on your disk; a cut is a list of timecodes, and playback reads the original files from your own machine.

We don't sell your content. Beyond running the service, we may use content you send us to operate, maintain, and improve FirstCut, including improving the quality of the transcripts and cuts it produces. This licence is limited to those purposes; it ends when you delete the content or your account, subject to ordinary backup and log retention.

5. Acceptable use

Don't use FirstCut to:

• process content you don't have the rights to, or content that is unlawful where you or we are;
• produce material that harasses, defames, threatens, or deceives — including edits that put words in a real person's mouth by rearranging what they said;
• process or produce sexually explicit, pornographic or otherwise NSFW material, or anything that sexualises minors — whatever rights you hold in it;
• process or produce hate speech, or material that promotes violence, self-harm, or illegal activity;
• probe, scan, or work around the isolation between accounts, the usage limits, or any gate on the service;
• reverse-engineer, scrape, or automate the service beyond ordinary interactive use, or resell it as your own.

Editing is selective by nature — that's the craft. The line here is representing a fabricated statement as something a person actually said. The same rules in plain language, with what happens when they're broken, are in our Acceptable Use Policy.

6. AI-generated cuts

FirstCut produces a rough cut: a machine-made first draft. Transcripts contain errors, and a model choosing clips can misread intent, drop context, or assemble something that doesn't say what the source said.

• Review before you publish. You're responsible for what you release, and for checking that the cut represents your source fairly.
• The player is a preview, not a finishing tool. Clip boundaries advance on a browser timer and source switches aren't gapless. The exported EDL/XML carries the exact timecodes — treat the export as authoritative.
• Output isn't unique. Similar briefs over similar footage can produce similar structures for other users. As between you and us, the cut made from your footage is yours.

7. Source formats and timing accuracy

FirstCut reads your audio in your browser, and only the audio is ever sent to us. How it does that depends on the format you give it — and that choice affects how precisely the timecodes in your cut line up with your video.

• MP4 or MOV with AAC audio is the recommended format. Its audio is copied out as-is, without being re-packaged or re-encoded, so the timeline we transcribe is the timeline your file already had. If you can choose what to export, choose this.
• Other formats are converted first, and conversion moves timings slightly. Opus and Vorbis audio (typically WebM and MKV) is repackaged into Ogg; raw or lossless audio — such as the PCM in ProRes and many camera masters — is compressed to Opus so that a small file uploads instead of a very large one. This happens on your machine and your video still never leaves it. But rewriting a container regenerates its timing information, and small offsets are inherent to doing so rather than a fault we can remove.
• Expect drift of roughly two hundredths of a second, and possibly more. On our own test material the difference measured about 0.019 seconds. That figure is an observation on one file, not a guarantee or a ceiling: it varies with the source, and it can be larger. It is normally shorter than a single video frame, but it is not zero.
• If exact timing matters to you, convert before you import. Re-exporting your source as MP4 with AAC audio removes the conversion step altogether. Otherwise, treat the cut's timings as close rather than exact and trim in your own editor.

Separately from the above, and true of every format: the timecodes come from the audio timeline, which some files deliberately offset from the picture. So we don't promise frame-accurate timing in any case — an export is a starting point for your editor, not a finished timeline. See §6 and §13.

8. Your local files — and what we don't store

FirstCut is not a storage service. What we keep — the extracted audio, the transcripts, and your sequences — we keep in order to run the service, not as a place for you to keep your media. We don't host your video, we don't offer the material you sent us back to you as a download, and we don't undertake to keep anything available for any particular length of time. An export is produced when you ask for it and handed to you then; it isn't archived for you to fetch later. We may apply storage and retention limits, and remove old or inactive material, at any time.

Because the video never uploads, playback depends on your own files staying where they are. If you move, rename, or delete a source file, the cut still exists but can't be previewed until you relink it.

• We are not a backup service. We never hold your video, so we can never restore it, and nothing we do hold should be treated as your only copy. Keep your own copies.
• On supported browsers, FirstCut stores a small reference to where a file lives, and your unsaved edits, in your browser's local storage. Clearing site data discards them.
• Some formats can't be decoded in a browser (ProRes, many MKV files, some HEVC). Transcription and editing still work; only the picture preview is affected. See Help.

9. Plans, limits, and payment

FirstCut has a free plan and paid subscriptions, billed monthly or annually. Every plan has usage limits per billing period — hours of footage imported and AI cuts generated — plus a cap on the total footage in a single sequence. The plan page states the current figures. Limits exist to keep the service affordable to run and can change.

Who you pay. Paid plans are sold through Creem, operated by Armitage Labs OÜ (Estonia, registry code 16977866), which acts as our merchant of record: it takes the payment, charges any sales tax or VAT, issues your invoice, and is the name that appears on your card statement. The service itself is provided by us, as described in section 1.

Paid plans work like this. The refunds and cancellation page restates the money parts of this section in plain language — this section is the binding one if they ever disagree:

• subscriptions are charged in advance on the billing day, not in arrears;
• you can cancel yourself at any time; cancelling stops the next charge and your paid period runs to its end;
• moving to a larger plan, or from monthly to annual billing, takes effect immediately and the prorated difference is charged at once; moving to a smaller plan, or from annual to monthly, takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and nothing changes until then;
• if a renewal payment fails, you keep access until the end of the period you last paid for; update your payment method from your account to continue past it;
• your first subscription payment is refundable for 14 days— if the tool isn't for you, ask and we'll return it;
• footage you have imported stays free to re-cut for three months from the point its transcript is ready, and no longer than the subscription you imported it under; after that we may delete the extracted audio and the transcript (see section 8), and importing the same file again is charged again. Sequences built from that footage are kept for at least as long as the footage itself and are not guaranteed after that — export anything you want to keep;
• top-ups, where offered, are one-time purchases that add to your allowance for the rest of the billing period you buy them in, or seven days from purchase, whichever is longer — an unused balance expires at that point and does not carry into the next period;
• after that, fees are non-refundable once processed — renewals and top-ups included, whether spent or left unused at the end of the period; cancelling ends the recurrence, it doesn't refund the period you are in — except where consumer law that applies to you requires otherwise;
• prices and plan contents can change, with notice before the change takes effect for you.

How much footage is supported. Paid plans are sized for up to one hour of footage in a single sequence. More than that may work, and we may raise the limit as the service grows — but one hour is the figure we support, and anything beyond it is not something we undertake to make work.

What paying buys. A subscription pays for use of the service — transcribing your footage, generating cuts, and exporting them — and not for a particular result. We don't promise that a cut will be good, usable, suited to your brief, or comparable to one made by a human editor, and we don't refund on the basis that the output didn't meet expectations. See §6 and §13.

Nothing in this section obliges us to keep any particular plan, or any free tier, available indefinitely.

10. Availability and change

FirstCut is under active development. Features can change, move, or be removed; the service can be unavailable for maintenance or for reasons outside our control. There is no uptime commitment and no service-level agreement. We'll try to give notice of changes that would break your work, and to keep exports working so your cuts can leave.

11. Third-party services

We run FirstCut on infrastructure and services from other companies — cloud hosting and authentication, a speech-to-text provider, an AI model provider, and analytics. Their handling of the data we pass to them is governed by their own terms, and the privacy summary describes what is passed. We're responsible for choosing them; we're not responsible for their outages.

12. Ending the agreement

You can stop using FirstCut at any time, and you can clear your locally stored data from the Account page. To have your stored audio, transcripts, and sequences removed, write to us at the address below.

We may suspend, end, or delete an account that breaches these terms, that abuses the service's capacity, or where we're required to by law — with notice where it's practical to give it. Where an account is ended for prohibited conduct, that happens without refund or compensation, and the work in it may be deleted with it.

If we discontinue the service ourselves, we'll give reasonable notice so you can export your work. Sections 3, 6, and 12 through 16 survive the end of the agreement.

13. Disclaimers

FirstCut is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the extent the law allows, we make no warranties — express or implied — about merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

In particular, we don't warrant that transcripts are accurate, that a generated cut will be usable or suit your brief, that playback will work with any given file or browser, or that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free.

14. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent the law allows, we're not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, goodwill, data, lost projects, lost footage, or missed deadlines, arising from your use of the service.

Our total liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or over the whole term of this agreement, whichever period is shorter. If you have paid us nothing, that amount is zero.

Nothing here limits liability that can't be limited by law — including fraud, and your mandatory rights as a consumer where you live.

15. Your responsibility for your content

You agree to cover us for claims, losses, and reasonable costs that arise from content you bring to the service or from your use of it in breach of these terms — for example a claim that you didn't have the rights to the footage you processed.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the product changes. The date at the top always says when they last changed. For material changes we'll give notice in the app or by email before they take effect. Continuing to use FirstCut after that means you accept the updated terms; if you don't, stop using the service and ask us to remove your data.

17. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Israel, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules, and its competent courts have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.

If you use FirstCut as a consumer elsewhere, this doesn't take away the protection of mandatory consumer rules of the country where you live, or your right to bring proceedings there where the law gives you one.

18. Contact

Questions about these terms, data removal requests, and legal notices go to the operator named in section 1:

These terms are written in plain language to be understood rather than to be exhaustive. They're not legal advice, and they haven't been drafted by a lawyer.