Can I code this? A Screen Recording Tool for Tutorials
Recording your screen and hosting the result shares Loom's exact buildable shape. Viewer analytics tied to a CRM is the one piece worth skipping for a personal tutorial tool.
Borderline
Effort: a weekendRunning cost: $8–$16/mo
Why CanICodeThis says Borderline
Screen recording via the OS's native capture, uploaded to storage, shares this register's Loom-style build spec
A watch page with an embedded player is standard front-end work
Basic view counts are simple, bounded tracking
The parts that'll cause problems
Video hosting and delivery at reasonable quality shares real infrastructure concerns with every video app on this register — host through an existing service
Viewer-level engagement analytics (who watched how far) need real event tracking beyond a view counter
Automatic captions/transcription add a real speech-to-text integration if you want them
How I'd build this
frontend
Astro or Next.js
hosting
Cloudflare Pages
MVP scope
Screen recording via OS capture, uploaded to storage
A watch page with an embedded player
Basic view counts
Organize recordings into folders
Postpone to v2
Viewer-level engagement analytics
Automatic captions via speech-to-text
CRM or team integration
What it actually costs to build
AI agent — with a subscription (Claude Pro/Max, Cursor, etc.)
$0 marginal
AI agent — pay-per-use API, no subscription
$43–$86 one-time
Hosting, once it's running
$8–$16/mo
Domain name, if you want your own
~$12/yr
Existing tools solving a similar problem typically run $15–$19/mo — see how they compare below.
The build prompt
Genuinely one of the more approachable builds here:
1. Record your screen using the OS's native capture — no custom recording engine needed.
2. Upload to object storage.
3. A watch page with an embedded player and a shareable link.
4. Basic view counts, and folders to organize recordings.
That's a real, complete screen-recording tool. Out of scope: viewer-level engagement analytics (which exact seconds people rewatch or skip), which need real event-based tracking, not a view counter, and automatic captions via speech-to-text, a genuine, separate API integration.