1. What problem does it solve?
Subtitles are the least glamorous part of post-production — and one of the most expensive in hours. Studios can spend three hours typing subtitles by hand for every twenty minutes of video. For a freelance editor shipping a video a day, captions are the chore that eats the evening.
OpenAI's Whisper, open-sourced in September 2022, could transcribe speech in roughly 99 languages. But raw Whisper output is not a product: words come back with shaky timestamps, no sensible line breaks, and Hebrew renders left-to-right — a string of characters that begins with the period and ends with the first word of the sentence. An editor cannot drop that into a timeline.
Adobe's own transcription didn't help either: when the work began, Premiere Pro's native Speech to Text supported major Western and East Asian languages, but not Hebrew. Whisper did. "The whole thing started because Adobe didn't support Hebrew and Whisper did," co-founder Yuval Steuer said. "That was the opening." Kaps closes the gap between Whisper's raw output and a production-ready subtitle file: extract the audio, run it through Whisper at the right model size, hold on to the word-level timestamps, detect the boundaries that make natural subtitle breaks, handle right-to-left rendering, and hand back an SRT file Premiere can ingest in two clicks.
2. Who pays, how much, and in what scenario?
The buyer: a freelance video editor or small editing shop — Hebrew-speaking at first, then Polish, Hungarian, Arabic, and Portuguese-speaking markets as the product spread. The customer edits every day, hates typing captions, and already lives inside Premiere Pro.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual Editor | $39/mo | $22.90/mo | 30 min transcription/mo, 1 seat |
| Professional Editor | $60/mo | $34.90/mo | 180 min/mo, unlimited automatic cuts, 1 seat |
| Business | $199/mo | $119/mo | 999 min/mo, 3 seats, multi-editor support |
Pricing verified from Kaps' own pricing page, checked Nov 14, 2026. Every plan includes subtitles in any language and support for Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and After Effects. A few free trial minutes come with registration — no credit card. The site claims up to 98% accuracy on good recordings, 85% on average sound.
The scenario that makes someone pay: the first video where captions land on the timeline already timed, and the editor only fixes typos instead of typing for three hours. Minutes are the meter: a one-video-a-day editor fits the Individual plan; a freelancer cutting nine videos a day outgrows it and moves to Professional. The more a customer edits, the more Kaps earns — no upgrade call, no negotiation.
Sanity check (our estimate, not a reported figure): $70,000 MRR ÷ roughly $35 a month blended implies about 2,000 paying customers — around 5% of 40,000+ users. The free trial is the top of the funnel; conversion is the number that matters, and Kaps has not disclosed it.
3. How did it find these people?
Kaps has had two lives, and both were found the same way: through video editors talking to video editors.
Life one: the builder who sold. Ben Lavi, a video editor who was paying his own team to type captions by hand, built the first Kaps in 2023. It hit $10K MRR one month after launch and about ₪100K a month (roughly $27K) within six months, "running almost entirely on autopilot" — grown through affiliate deals with Israeli video editors. Then October 7th, 2023 changed everything: four months of military service, unable to work on anything. When he came back, he sold his remaining stake in his video production company in January 2024, and Kaps in March. "I needed a clean slate."
Life two: the influencer engine. By January 2025 the company was run by Yuval Steuer and Roey Lalazar, and the growth story was an influencer playbook. A well-known video-editing influencer who knew Steuer posted about Kaps on Instagram; the audience was almost entirely video editors with the problem, and within thirty minutes Kaps received $4,000 in pre-orders. "That first influencer post was crazy," Steuer said. "We made four thousand dollars in pre-orders in half an hour, and that was the moment we knew this was real."
The post became the strategy: Kaps eventually worked with seventy to eighty influencers across markets, led by a young Head of Growth, Avi Srivastava, who ran the influencer and advertising strategy as the product expanded beyond Hebrew. Behind it sat unglamorous infrastructure: individual landing pages for each market on a shared Tailwind UI template, copy rewritten for each audience, and specialists hired by language and function through OnlineJobs.ph — copywriters, plugin developers, lead-generation analysts, outreach operators.
Steuer documented his own year living out of his car while Kaps found its footing on X, where his account became well-known in Israeli indie-founder circles. "The car thing sounds dramatic now," he said. "But at the time, it was just math. I wanted the lowest possible burn so I could keep building."
4. Why does it work?
Kaps' wedge is not the AI — Whisper is open source, and anyone can run it. The wedge is the workflow, in the language, inside the editor: timestamps that hold, breaks at natural pauses, right-to-left text that renders correctly, an SRT that drops into Premiere in two clicks, for languages Adobe didn't serve — delivered to buyers through the editors they already trust. Enterprise AI sends engineers to every customer; that will never reach a freelance editor. Kaps built the opposite — a plugin, a free trial, and seventy-odd influencers — and bootstrapping forced the clarity: "You can't lie to yourself for long," Steuer said. "Revenue paid the bills."
5. Could you build it?
The product, yes. The business, not by copying the product.
Replicable: the shape — Whisper plus word-level alignment, subtitle segmentation, and a Premiere panel — can be assembled from existing pieces by a small team. Ben Lavi did it with no coding background, through a vibe-coding academy.
Not replicable by cloning: the distribution. Seventy to eighty influencers who trust the product, per-language landing pages and timing quality tuned market by market, and 40,000 users' worth of real editing sessions. A new entrant would need its own trust channel — a different language Adobe still ignores, a different editor, a different community — not a better transcription model.
The opening it leaves: the wedge is a feature gap, and feature gaps close — Adobe can ship the missing language, and free caption tools already crowd the low end. The defensible ground is the workflow depth: timing accuracy, right-to-left handling, and the auto-cut features that turn a transcription into an edit. A competitor that owns one underserved language completely, or one editor natively, still has room.
The numbers
| Revenue | $1M+ ARR / $70K MRR (founder-reported, Jan 2025, Technori) |
|---|---|
| Users | 40,000+, twelve months after launch |
| First version | Ben Lavi: $10K MRR in month one, ~₪100K/mo (~$27K) in six months; sold Mar 2024 |
| Growth | $4,000 pre-orders in 30 min from first influencer post; 70–80 influencers |
| Funding | $0 — bootstrapped, no venture capital |
| Founders | Yuval Steuer, Roey Lalazar (current); Ben Lavi (original builder, sold Mar 2024) |
| Pricing | $39 / $60 / $199 per month ($22.90 / $34.90 / $119 annual), by transcription minutes |
| Product | Premiere Pro plugin (also Resolve & After Effects); Whisper-based; started with Hebrew |
What we don't know
- Current revenue (Nov 2026) — the latest public figure is January 2025; the site is live and pricing is current, but nothing newer has been disclosed.
- The sale: what Ben Lavi sold Kaps for in March 2024, and whether Steuer and Lalazar were the buyers — neither source says, and the two accounts differ on who "built" Kaps.
- Paying customer count and churn — our ~2,000 is an estimate from a blended price, not a reported figure.
- Gross margin — whether Kaps runs Whisper on its own GPUs or through an API is not public, so the cost per transcribed minute is unknowable from outside.
- How much of the 40,000 users are active vs. one-time free trials.
Sources
Technori, "The Indie Builder Who Beat Adobe to Hebrew Subtitles" (Jan 15, 2025) — technori.com
Ben Lavi, personal site (Kaps history; built 2023, sold March 2024) — benla.co.il
Founder Views podcast, "Ben Lavi (nCode): Why Most Vibe-Coded Apps Die and Where Your First 100 Customers Come From" — podcast.app
Kaps pricing page — getkaps.com/pricing (checked Nov 14, 2026)
Kaps homepage — getkaps.com (checked Nov 14, 2026)
MilestoneWins listing: milestonewins.com/launches/kaps/ ($1M ARR, founders Yuval Steuer, Roey Lalazar)