Castly: simple Mac screen recording with webcam, mic, and local saving
Hey r/macapps, I built Castly, a simple Mac screen recording app focused only on recording. Problem: I wanted a screen recording app that also captures the webcam, so product demos and similar videos feel more alive. At the same time, I wanted something lightweight and easy to use, without editing, timelines, or extra workflow complexity. Castly lets you record the full screen, a window, or an area, optionally include your mic, add a circular webcam overlay, and save everything locally. Comparison: Apps like Loom and Screen Studio offer more features, especially around editing and post-production. Castly is much simpler and more limited, but it is also subscription-free and comparatively inexpensive. The focus is just on quick, straightforward recording. Pricing: Castly is free to use. A one-time purchase of $2.99 removes the small watermark in recordings. Download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castly-screen-recorder/id6762443163 I’d love feedback from people here: what would you still want from a recording-only Mac app before it feels complete enough to use regularly?
Collected discussion
Is it possible to save the webcam and screen recording as two separate files?
out of curiosity what would be the use case for that?
I teach students. I would like to have more control on when and where the webcam footage is placed on screen. I would be using a fcp or resolve to edit my videos.
I would say editing and post prod but idk
OBS
i think the OBS comparison kinda misses the point. nobody opens OBS for a 2-minute async demo for their team. the niche here is “Loom but my video doesn’t go to a SaaS ” OP can confirm!
I genuinely do.
It's great that you support System Audio out of the box. It drives me mad that up to this day for built-in QuickTime Player recordings it requires creating a virtual input and output sources to do that
Looks great, and I was hoping to try it out, but I need the ability to choose screens for sharing, and it just doesn't work for that for me. Also, there's no "Quit" in the Apple menu and Cmd+Q doesn't work. It seems like it's not quite refined enough yet.
You’re right i missed that! You can close it for now by right clicking the dock icon. Will be fixed in the next release 🙏
$2.99 one-time to remove a watermark is about as fair as pricing gets in this space. Direct answer to your question: audio device switching without stopping the recording. It's the one thing that kills otherwise simple recording workflows.
Looks nice, how’s performance compare to obs?
Local saving by default is the right call and I wish more recording tools led with it instead of burying it as an opt-in. The webcam bubble placement is what separates good recording tools from clunky ones. Does Castly let you position the webcam feed independently of the recording region, or does it always capture both together? The use case I run into constantly is recording a specific window while keeping the webcam overlay visible outside that window's bounds. Most tools either force you to record the full screen to solve this or just do not support it at all.
It's a shame apple doesn't have this by default, their cmd+shift+5 is so great already, sounds like a nice feature. The thing that i noticed when making videos was that in 15 minutes i guarantee that you will do something in the area of the webcam. it makes sense to have some kind of feature that detects if the cursor is in the webcam region and moves the camera view
Nice one!
Was really looking for a replacement for screen studio, surely going to give this a try
fair price. pay it
I use Kap for this.
I have only question that will make me decide weather to even think about installing this. Is this written in native Swift? I know the app page says screencapturekit but it may only be utilizing a small Swift wrapper to communicate with the framework while the rest of the app is written in python or go. I had absolute terrible performance with cap.
this is something that should have been built in on macs lol
I'm thinking about launching a free/pro app soon. How did you arrive at $2.99 for the watermark removal? Love to know how other builders value what they build.
ove how simple this looks. Most screen recorders now are bloated subscriptions that force everything into the cloud. Is this 100% local storage? That’s a huge selling point for me.
looks solid
The "system audio" option is cool. QuickTime doesn't have that.
Look I good, well done I'm working on something similar but should be cross platform and also have that zoom animations Not sure what is the market for this But congrats on launch