For years, recording a quick screen walkthrough meant picking your poison.
Loom and its clones upload everything to the cloud the moment you stop recording — fine until you're screen-sharing something under NDA, a client's dashboard, or your own unpublished code. OBS Studio and Camtasia go the other way: powerful, local, and completely overwhelming if all you want is "record my screen, highlight my cursor, export a video." And almost everything in between slaps a watermark on your export unless you pay upfront, before you even know if the tool fits how you work.
I wanted something in the middle: as easy as Loom, as private as OBS, with the one feature I keep missing everywhere — cursor highlighting and auto-zoom-on-click, so I stop narrating "and now I'm clicking this button over here" out loud in every recording.
That's ScreenGlimpse.
The realization
Once I actually mapped out what I wanted, it came down to three requirements:
Nothing leaves the device. No upload step, no "processing in the cloud," no account required just to hit record.
The recording should explain itself. A viewer should be able to follow where the action is happening without the narrator constantly saying "up here" or "over there."
No paywall on the basics. Recording, exporting, and using it daily should work for free — the paywall should be for depth, not for entry.
What I built
ScreenGlimpse is a screen recorder that runs either as a native desktop app (Windows, macOS, Linux) or straight in the browser with no install — same recording engine either way. Every recording, every encode, every export happens on-device. There's no backend that ever sees your video.
The free tier ("Glimpse") is unlimited local recordings with mic, webcam, and system audio, exported as WebM. The paid tier ("Focus") adds the features that make a recording easier to follow and easier to share: automatic cursor highlight and click-to-zoom, 4K/MP4 export, no watermark, region screenshots with markup, a freeform whiteboard, and GIF export.
The technical stack
Electron + Angular/Ionic for the shell. Using Ionic for the UI meant the same codebase could ship as a desktop app and run directly in a browser tab, instead of maintaining two separate front ends for "install it" and "just try it."
Native cursor tracking via a global input hook (not browser mouse events) — this is what makes the cursor highlight and click-to-zoom actually work: it has to track the cursor and clicks system-wide, independent of whatever the browser's getDisplayMedia capture stream reports, and keep working smoothly during the recording itself.
ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, running entirely client-side for encoding and export. No render queue on a server, no upload-then-download round trip — the trade-off is it's bounded by the user's own machine, which given requirement #1 was the right trade to make.
On-device face/segmentation models (MediaPipe) for the optional camera effects — background replacement and camera filters run locally too, same privacy rule applied consistently instead of carving out an exception the moment a feature needed "AI."
Hosted checkout, not homegrown billing. Payment redirects to a third-party checkout page instead of embedding any payment UI or telemetry SDK in the app. It keeps the "nothing leaves your device" promise honest — the app itself never touches your card details or reports usage anywhere.
What I learned
Privacy isn't a feature you add later — it's an architecture decision. The moment you design "record locally, but also let's add cloud AI effects," you've quietly broken the promise for a chunk of your users. Every feature I've added had to pass the same test: does this still work with the device offline?
The paywall belongs on depth, not on entry. Free users get a genuinely usable recorder, not a crippled trial. That's the thing that gets someone to actually try it instead of bouncing off a pricing page.
"It just works, everywhere" is more expensive than it sounds. Supporting Windows, macOS, and Linux with one codebase, plus a browser fallback with no install, meant a lot of the hard work was in the boring parts — packaging, auto-updates, platform-specific permission quirks — not in the recording feature itself.
Try it
Free in the browser, no account needed: screenglimpse.com. The desktop app (Focus) adds cursor highlight, 4K export, and no watermark for $5/mo or $50/yr — or pay once ($100) and keep it.
