Why I built CursorFlow: a $50 native Mac screen recorder
Short version: I paid Loom around $720 over three years to upload my own screen to someone else's server. Then I shipped a $50 alternative that runs entirely on my Mac.
The bill
The Loom plan I needed cost about $20 a month — long-form recordings, transcripts, a custom thumbnail. Multiply by 36 months and you get $720. Every dollar of it went to a cloud recorder I used about twice a week — for product demos, async standups, the occasional onboarding clip. Useful, but not a $720 kind of useful.
paid to Loom over 36 months · for a tool used about twice a week
The real prompt to switch wasn't the bill. It was watching a Loom of an unreleased feature finish uploading while the laptop fan was still spinning. I hadn't shared it with anyone yet. The video lived on a server I didn't own, behind a login that wasn't mine, indexed for search by a team I'd never met. That bothered me more than the $20.
"The video lived on a server I didn't own, behind a login that wasn't mine, indexed for search by a team I'd never met."
What I actually wanted
I didn't want to "replace Loom" with something philosophically pure. I wanted four things:
- The footage on my disk. No upload step. No second copy I can't audit.
- The cinematic stuff Loom didn't do — automatic zoom on every click, cursor motion smoothing, a real editor I can scrub through.
- A built-in teleprompter so I'd stop fumbling my own lines on talking-head shots.
- One price, paid once. I was tired of recurring line items for tools I touch twice a week.
None of the recorders I looked at had all four. The good cloud ones (Loom, Screen.studio, Tella) ship features 3 and 4 differently, but they all keep the footage somewhere else. The local ones (QuickTime, OBS) ship the privacy part and skip the cinematic part. So I made the thing I wanted.
What CursorFlow does
It's a native macOS app, not Electron. Every click triggers an automatic zoom into the target, then pulls back. The cursor path gets smoothed into clean strokes instead of the small jitters from your wrist. There's a teleprompter that scrolls your script in a window the recording can't see, on-device transcription via Apple's Speech framework with burnt-in captions, and a real-time editor where the preview is the export — no rendering, no surprises.
Multi-track capture means the screen, webcam, microphone are recorded as separate tracks. You can mute the cam without re-recording. You can re-position the webcam later without a re-cut. Privacy masks blur regions and follow them as the screen scrolls. Keystroke overlay shows the shortcuts you press. The export is 4K at native resolution, in three orientations: 16:9, vertical 9:16 (covers YouTube Shorts, Reels, and TikTok), and 1:1 square.
None of that is novel on its own. The novel part is that all of it ships in one app on macOS, runs on-device, and costs $50 once.
What CursorFlow isn't
It isn't a Loom replacement for teams of fifty. It doesn't have shared workspaces, viewer analytics, comment threads on the timeline, or a marketing dashboard. It isn't a Final Cut competitor either — I won't be cutting a feature film with it.
It's a recorder + lightweight editor for one person making short videos: product demos, changelog clips, tutorial walkthroughs, YouTube how-tos. If that's the box you're in, the app fits. If your team needs Looms with view counts, you should buy Loom.
Why $50, paid once
$50 because $0 isn't a price — free tools don't survive on a solo developer's calendar. $50 isn't $20 a month for life either; you pay it and you own the app for the version you bought, with one year of updates included.
2 Macs per licence so a desktop and a laptop are covered. 14 days to refund, no questions. The DMG is signed and notarised; the licence check is the only outbound call the app makes, against Polar's public API.
That's the pitch. I built the tool I wanted and priced it like an indie product. If any of the above sounds like you, the rest of this blog is more of the same — specific writing about screen recording, video, and what makes a Mac recording feel produced instead of raw.
