Our own SaaS that turns a pasted YouTube video into a visual lesson, now live with all three output modes proven end to end.

Long videos, slow to learn from

Long YouTube coaching videos are slow to learn from. The useful parts can be spread across an hour of talking, and pulling them out means scrubbing back, pausing on the right frame, and writing notes by hand. We built Alexana Essence, our own product, to do that work. Paste a YouTube link and you get back a visual lesson you can read in a few minutes, with the key screenshots, the takeaways, and a quiz. To be worth paying for, it had to handle hour-long videos reliably and cost less to run than it charges.

A web app, a worker, and a meter

We split the product into a web app that people use and a worker that does the heavy processing. Then we measured what each video actually costs before settling on prices.

• Built the Next.js app on Vercel with Clerk sign-in and Convex as both the database and the job queue, so every submitted video becomes a tracked job that the worker picks up.
• Wrote a server worker that fetches the video with yt-dlp, drives a headless browser, and calls OpenRouter models to write each lesson. Hour-long videos are split into chunks, and a coverage check fails the job and refunds the tokens instead of returning a lesson with gaps.
• Shipped three output modes, each metered at its own token rate: a playbook with screenshots, a playbook without them, and an interactive lesson.
• Measured the processing cost per minute of video. As of September 2, 2026, membership usage was running at a loss while top-up packs stayed profitable, so pricing gets fixed before payments go live. Stripe checkout is built and runs in test mode for now.
• Added an owner-only admin console for accounts, usage, and every generated lesson. On September 22 we added a GitHub Actions pipeline that runs the Python, worker, and web test suites.

Live, with every mode proven

Alexana Essence is live at essence.alexana.co. The week of September 20, 2026, we ran all three output modes end to end on the live site. A pasted link went in, the tokens were held and settled at the right amount, and a finished lesson or playbook came back. Earlier in September we shipped worker fixes for cross-site scripting, file-read, and path-traversal bugs. Checkout is still in Stripe test mode, so the next move is the pricing fix and then turning payments on. What runs today is a working self-serve product that takes a long video and hands back something you can study in a few minutes.