From After Effects frustration to DevMotion: my solo nights-and-weekends AI motion video editor

Hey Indie Hackers 👋

I'm Emanuele — AI engineer, 15+ years in, dad of two, building DevMotion on nights and weekends.

Why I built this. Every time I wanted a decent demo video for a product, I hit the same wall: After Effects is a cliff, CapCut is fine for TikTok but weak for software demos, and the AI tools either generate clips you can't edit or edit videos you can't generate. I wanted one place where I could prompt a motion-designed scene, drop in a screen recording, auto-caption it, dub it into three languages, and export one project to every aspect ratio. That didn't exist. So here we are.

What's actually in the box:

• 🎬 Full timeline + keyframe editor in the browser (no install, no Adobe)

• 💬 Chat with Kimi K2.6, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Grok 4.1, Gemini 3 Pro — they edit the timeline directly

• 🎥 Seedance 2.0 video generation (text-to-video with synced audio)

• 🎤 Screen + camera recording, AI auto-captions with word-level timing, AI dubbing with voice cloning

• 🧩 17+ layer types: browser mockups, 3D laptops, phones, code blocks, terminals

• 📐 One project → every platform: 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, up to 4K

• 🤖 MCP server so Claude/Cursor can drive the editor autonomously (claude mcp add --transport http devmotion https://devmotion.app/mcp)

• 🔌 REST API + webhooks for programmatic/batch rendering

Pricing: Free plan is genuinely usable (full editor, 20 AI credits, 5 exports/month, MCP access). Creator is $9/mo, Pro is $29/mo. Manual timeline editing is free forever for everyone.

What I'd love from you today:

1. Break it. Tell me where it's janky — I'll be in the comments all day.

2. If you try it and have thoughts, I'd honestly love to hear them live — book 30 min with me.

3. Feature requests go here so they don't get lost: devmotion.canny.io

Thanks for looking. Upvotes help, but honest feedback helps more.

— Ema