PunchyCaptions

PunchyCaptions adds bold, animated, word-by-word captions — the karaoke style you see across short social video — to a video you already have, and exports it as a finished MP4. You bring in a clip, get your words on screen and timed to the audio, style them, and export. It all runs on your Mac.

A Mac running macOS 15.6 Sequoia or later. PunchyCaptions is a Mac app — there is no iPhone or iPad version.

Import a finished video (the toolbar's Import Video… button). It plays in the preview on the left, with the script and timing on the right. From there you get your words on screen in one of two ways — paste a script, or transcribe the audio — then fine-tune the timing, style the captions, and export.

Both give you timed, on-screen words — pick whichever suits the clip:

• Paste a script: drop in your words and PunchyCaptions spreads them across the clip as a starting point. You then nudge each word's timing until it lands on the beat.
• Transcribe the audio: PunchyCaptions listens to the video's audio and turns the spoken words into timed captions automatically. The transcription runs entirely on your Mac.

You can select a run of words and save it as a word group, so you can retime those words together later instead of one at a time.

Nothing is uploaded. PunchyCaptions makes no network connections at all — there's no account, no sign-in, no servers, no analytics, and no tracking. Your videos and projects stay in the files you choose, on your own Mac.

Transcription runs on-device using Apple's built-in speech recognition, so your audio is never sent anywhere. The only permission the app asks for is Speech Recognition, purely for that. See our Privacy Policy for the full picture.

Quite a lot — the aim is that it looks like yours, not a template:

• Any font installed on your Mac, at the size you set, upper-case or as-typed.
• The text colour, and a separate highlight colour for the active (spoken) word.
• An outline, at the weight you choose, and an optional background panel with adjustable opacity.
• How many words appear at once, how much the active word pops as it lands, and where the line sits vertically in the frame.

Everything renders live in the preview, so what you see is what you export.

PunchyCaptions burns the captions into the video and writes an MP4, using either H.264 or HEVC. Because the exporter uses the same renderer as the preview, the exported file matches what you saw on screen.

PunchyCaptions is free to use in full. Every feature — importing, transcribing, scripting, styling, editing and previewing — works without paying. The one difference in the free version is that the videos you export carry a watermark.

PunchyCaptions Pro is a one-time purchase of $19.99 (or local equivalent) that removes the watermark, so you can export clean, finished videos. A few things worth knowing:

• It's a one-time purchase — not a subscription. Buy it once and it's yours; nothing renews and nothing expires.
• Removing the export watermark is the only thing it changes. Everything else is already unlocked for free.
• There's no trial, because the free version is the trial: it does everything, you just get a watermark on exports until you upgrade.
• All billing is handled by Apple through the App Store. PunchyCaptions never sees your payment details.

Choose Restore Purchases (in the app menu, or on the upgrade screen) while signed in to the App Store with the same Apple Account you bought it on. That re-checks your purchase and removes the watermark. If it still doesn't unlock, get in touch below.

Yes. PunchyCaptions needs no internet connection to work — importing, transcribing, editing and exporting all happen on your Mac. (Your Mac may fetch Apple's on-device speech model the first time you transcribe, which macOS handles; your audio still never leaves the device.)