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        <div class="eyebrow">About</div>
        <h1>Local-first by design</h1>
        <p class="article-lede">A faceless YouTube channel today needs a script tool, a voice tool, a captions tool, a music tool, a thumbnail tool, an SEO tool, a scheduler, and a cloud render farm. That's eight monthly bills before a single video ships. Phantomline replaces that stack with one local install.</p>
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      <h2>What Phantomline is</h2>
      <p>Phantomline is a local-first AI video studio. It generates scripts, narration, captions, music beds, visual layers, MP4 exports, and YouTube publishing drafts, all on your own machine. No per-render API fees. No usage caps you have to count against your project margin. License keys validate offline. The only thing on our servers is the marketing site.</p>

      <h2>What runs locally</h2>
      <p>On the desktop install, the heavy AI work happens on your hardware:</p>
      <ul>
        <li><strong>Ollama</strong> handles the language model: Llama 3.1 by default, but any model you can fit in your VRAM. Scripts, titles, descriptions, hooks.</li>
        <li><strong>Kokoro TTS</strong> handles narration. 16 voices ship with it. The model is ~330 MB on first run, then everything's local.</li>
        <li><strong>MusicGen</strong> generates ambient backing tracks via HuggingFace transformers. Crossfade-loops to any length you need.</li>
        <li><strong>ffmpeg</strong> assembles the final MP4. Industry standard, no Adobe license required.</li>
        <li><strong>Forge / AUTOMATIC1111</strong> (optional) for AI-generated scenes if you have it running locally on port 7861.</li>
      </ul>
      <p>On the browser version (phantomline.xyz/app), the same pipeline runs in-browser via WebLLM (Llama 3.2 1B over WebGPU), Web Speech API for TTS, Web Audio for music, ffmpeg.wasm for MP4. After the first load, the whole thing is airplane-mode safe.</p>

      <h2>Why local-first matters</h2>
      <p>The math on cloud-only AI video tools breaks at volume. Imagine you're shipping 30 videos a month, which is pretty normal for a faceless channel that wants to grow. At 4 cents a render across the script, voice, music, and caption pipeline (which is honestly cheap for a cloud stack), you're paying $1.20 per video, $36/month, on top of the subscriptions.</p>
      <p>Now scale that to multi-channel. Five faceless niches, 30 videos each, and the API meter is $180/month. Pure overhead before anyone watches a video.</p>
      <p>Local AI inverts this. Once you've installed the models, every render is free. The hardware you already own does the work.</p>

      <h2>Why faceless YouTube specifically</h2>
      <p>The faceless niche has a unique workflow profile. Creators ship volume. Reddit story channels can publish daily, listicle channels often post 3x a day. The bottleneck is rarely creative; it's pipeline cost and tool friction.</p>
      <p>General-purpose AI video tools (Pictory, InVideo, etc.) are designed for marketers making one explainer video a quarter. They're priced and shaped for that use case. Faceless creators get squeezed by per-export limits, watermark removal upcharges, and renew-or-die subscriptions.</p>
      <p>Phantomline is shaped for the volume use case from the start: render queues, schedule drafts, project bundles, channel-aware analytics, vidIQ-aware Optimize Library for republishing old uploads.</p>

      <h2>What we believe</h2>
      <ol>
        <li>Software you paid for should keep working when the company's website goes offline.</li>
        <li>If a feature doesn't need a server, it shouldn't have one.</li>
        <li>Pricing should be visible without a sales call.</li>
        <li>Lifetime tiers are a real promise, not a launch gimmick. Founding Lifetime customers get every Creator Pro feature forever, even if our pricing rises.</li>
      </ol>

      <h2>Who's behind this</h2>
      <p>Phantomline is co-founded by <a href="/kyle-mccool">Kyle McCool</a> (co-founder of <a href="https://makko.ai" rel="noopener">Makko AI</a>) with <a href="https://x.com/100xCesar" rel="noopener">Cesar Martinez</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-dillard-497604227/" rel="noopener">Zac Dillard</a> — the same trio behind <a href="/projects/prolocalbuilder">ProLocalBuilder</a>. <a href="mailto:kyle@makko.ai">kyle@makko.ai</a> for direct contact. Cesar handles UI work. The repo lives at <a href="https://github.com/Kyle-McCool/phantomline" rel="noopener" target="_blank">github.com/Kyle-McCool/phantomline</a> for the people who care.</p>

      <h2>Get started</h2>
      <p><a class="cta" href="/app">Open the studio</a> or <a href="/pricing">see pricing</a>. The free tier needs no card.</p>
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