Beamo
Beautiful, unlimited screen recording for Mac: multi-source, fully local, no subscription and no watermark.
The question I was chasing
Could a solo build beat the screen recorders everyone settles for, without a subscription, a watermark, or your video leaving the machine?
QuickTime can't do a webcam overlay, Loom puts your recordings in someone else's cloud behind a monthly fee, and OBS is a flight deck. Each one makes you give something up. I wanted to know whether one person could ship the recorder that doesn't make you choose.
Why it exists
I record a lot of product walkthroughs, and every tool made me trade something away: pay monthly, accept a watermark, learn a broadcast suite, or send my screen to the cloud. Native macOS now gives you everything you need to record beautifully and locally. Beamo is the recorder I wanted: open it, capture screen, window or camera, and own the file.
The constraints
Native macOS, Apple Silicon, and recording that stays 100% local: no cloud, no watermark, no subscription. That meant capturing screen, application windows and webcam, separately or all at once, with a live preview before you commit. It meant getting the audio path right across any mic, because a screen recording lives or dies on clean sound. And it had to feel light, a recorder you forget is running, not a studio you boot up.
The decisions that mattered
Native Swift, so screen, window and camera capture talk to the platform directly instead of fighting a cross-platform layer: capture quality is the product.
A live preview before recording, with screen, camera feed and audio meters, because the worst outcome is a long take you discover was wrong only at the end.
Webcam overlays you can shape, size and drag, so a talking-head clip looks considered without an editor. And Sparkle for automatic updates, so a free, locally installed app can still ship improvements without waiting behind an app-store gate.
What it is
A native macOS screen recorder: full-screen, single-window or multi-source capture with customisable webcam overlays, a live preview, clean audio handling, fun themes and unlimited recording, all 100% local, no watermark, no subscription. Lives in the menu bar with automatic updates.
Built with: Swift, Xcode, Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Sparkle
Where it landed
Live in beta on macOS, and the tool I now reach for to record every demo and walkthrough I ship. It's proof that the "just use Loom" default is beatable by a careful native build. What I'd take on next is light editing, trim and caption inside the app, so a clip is share-ready without a round-trip to another tool.
Part of the Rolling Waves work archive.