Riverside

Riverside is an online studio. Each participant's browser records that participant's own camera and microphone on their machine, so the files do not inherit the compression or dropouts of the call, and every speaker comes back as a separate track. The vendor states capture of up to 4K video and uncompressed audio in separate tracks, downloadable as WAV and MP4 per person.

The second half is editing by transcript. You cut the text, the video follows. On top of that sit the AI features the pricing page groups under "AI & Editing": removal of filler words and silences, eye contact correction, generated B-roll, Magic Clips, show notes, captions and audio enhancement. A "Correct speech" feature goes further and resynchronises voice and lips after you change the transcript wording, which the homepage describes as making it look "like that's what you said all along".

Live streaming and webinars are the third layer. Grow adds 1080p multistreaming to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Twitch, Instagram and TikTok plus custom RTMP, and the Webinar plan adds registration, Q&A, polls, reminder emails and a HubSpot sync.

Riverside publishes a hosted MCP server with one-click installs for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, and any MCP client can connect with the server URL. It is not a read-only connector: the vendor says a connected assistant can search transcripts, make edits, cut clips and schedule posts to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X.

Two limits are stated plainly. The assistant sees "only your content: recordings, transcripts, and projects", not billing or account settings, and every edit it makes "lands in your Riverside project as an editable version, not a finished export". Social publishing still requires the accounts to be connected inside the Riverside web platform first, and recording still happens in Riverside.

It is gated by plan. The MCP is included on Grow and above at no extra cost, which puts the cheapest path to it at the Grow tier rather than Pro. A separate API appears only against the Business plan on the pricing table, so programmatic access outside MCP means a sales conversation.

The pricing page lists Free, Pro, Grow and Webinar with figures, and Business with "Contact Sales". The vendor's own FAQ states both terms for every published tier: annual billing "saves you up to 20%", with Pro at $29 monthly against $24 a month billed yearly, Grow at $39 against $34, and Webinar at $99 against $79.

The page opens on the Yearly position of the billing toggle, so the first number a visitor sees is the discounted one. Prices are also localised: viewed from Europe the same Pro card reads €35 (about $39) monthly and €24 (about $27) yearly, which is a wider gap than the dollar figures imply.

Two meters sit underneath the subscription. Separate track downloads are capped at 15, 20 and 25 hours a month across Pro, Grow and Webinar, and recording itself is unlimited. AI Credits are a second currency: the FAQ says AI Translation, AI B-Roll and Animated Clips consume them, Pro starts with 2,000 and Business with 12,000, and "once credits are used, you can purchase more". No credit price is published, so the ceiling on a heavy translation or B-roll month is not knowable from the site.

Studios, not seats, are the unit of scale. Pro gives one, Grow two, Webinar three, Business unlimited, and an extra editor on the published plans is an add-on seat.

The terms grant Riverside a license to use uploaded content for "training, testing, developing, and improving Riverside's artificial intelligence and machine learning models, algorithms, and related technologies". Section 7.1 repeats it for prompts and results: "Riverside may use your Inputs and Outputs to train, fine-tune and improve its AI models and services." The same clause bars third-party AI providers from training on that material, so the carve-out protects the subcontractors' models and not the customer's content.

No setting, plan or contract route out of this is described anywhere on the public pages. A buyer recording confidential interviews should read Section 6.1 before signing up, and ask for the Data Processing Addendum the terms reference.

The published privacy policy is thin on the operational questions: retention is "as long as needed to provide the Services", there is no stated storage region or residency choice, and the page carries two revision dates in its own markup. Archiving of recordings on Free, Pro, Grow and Webinar is pushed out to a separate support article rather than stated in the terms.

SSO with Okta and Azure, SOC 2 and ISO 27001, Salesforce and Marketo integrations, API access, producer mode, collaborative editing, custom roles and a dedicated CSM all sit in the Business column, which carries no published figure. The AICPA SOC mark appears in the site footer across pages, so the audit is an organisational fact rather than a plan feature, but every control a security reviewer will ask about is sold through the same quote-only door.

No uptime commitment is published. The terms disclaim it directly, stating Riverside "does not warrant that the Platform or any services related thereto will be delivered or performed error-free or without interruption", and the only remedy named for persistent support failure is termination. No audit log of account activity is described on any page read.

It fits a podcast, interview or webinar operation that wants capture quality and post-production in one place and is happy to work in a browser. The free plan is a real standing plan rather than a countdown, with unlimited single-track recording and editing, two hours of multi-track, 720p and a watermark, and the homepage confirms "no credit card needed" to start.

It fits badly in three cases. Teams whose material cannot be used for model training have no published opt-out. Teams that need SSO, an API or a signed compliance package start at a sales call rather than a card. And teams planning heavy use of AI Translation or generated B-roll are buying into a credit meter whose top-up price is not on the site.

Cancellation deserves a read too: monthly billing has no term, but the terms require unsubscribing at least 30 days before the end of a subscription period to stop the automatic renewal, and fees are otherwise non-refundable outside the linked refund policy.