Looking for a Captions eye contact alternative?
Captions has one of the better eye contact implementations in the category, and its biggest advantage is structural rather than technical: it runs on the phone you shot the video on. Record, correct, caption and post without ever moving a file to a desktop. If your workflow is already mobile, that is hard to beat.
People go looking for an alternative when they hit the commercial edges. Eye contact is a generative AI feature, the free plan ships with no AI credits at all, and the cheapest plan that includes them is $24.99 a month. This is an honest comparison, including the cases where staying on Captions is clearly the right call.
What Captions' eye contact tool actually does
In the mobile app there is a dedicated Eye Contact button in the editing panel. You upload a clip or record one in the app, tap it, and the AI finds the moments your eyes drift off-camera and re-aligns your gaze to the lens. On Captions for web the same job is done by prompting the chat-based text editor rather than pressing a button — worth knowing, because the two surfaces do not work the same way.
Captions states that the tool is trained to detect specific failure modes — looking at a script, glancing off to the side, nervous blinking — and that it preserves intentional pauses and glances rather than locking a stare. That restraint is the difference between gaze correction that reads as natural and the glassy version, and it is the part Captions gets right.
Where Captions is genuinely the better choice
There are real cases where switching away would be a downgrade, and it is worth being clear about them:
- You shoot on your phone. Correcting on-device removes an entire file-transfer step that every browser tool still requires.
- You want the teleprompter and the correction in one place. Captions has an in-app teleprompter it says adapts to your pacing, so the tool that causes gaze drift and the tool that fixes it sit in the same app.
- You need captions, translation, voice cleanup or B-roll on the same clip. Doing four jobs in one export beats stitching tools together.
- Unused credits roll over month to month, up to three times your monthly allowance — more forgiving than plans that reset to zero.
- Its handling of intentional glances is a deliberate design goal, not an accident, and it shows in the output.
What eye contact actually costs on Captions
This is the part that sends people looking. Eye contact draws on AI usage credits, and the published plan comparison lists the free tier's AI credit quantity as None. The free plan is not useless — it includes the teleprompter, trimming, transitions and one caption template — but it cannot run the gaze correction.
Checked in August 2026, the plans are Max at $24.99/mo with 500 credits, then Scale at $69.99/mo for 1,400 credits, Scale 2x at $139.99/mo for 2,800, and Scale 4x at $279.99/mo for 5,600, with custom Enterprise pricing above that. Captions' own footnote says these figures reflect iOS plans, so what you see elsewhere may differ.
One caveat on third-party comparisons, including the ones that rank well for this query: several still list a $9.99 entry tier that is not on the current pricing page. Prices in this category move quickly. Check the source before you budget against a number from a review site.
The shared credit pool is the part that catches people out
Those 500 credits are not an eye contact allowance. They are a single pool drawn on by every generative feature in the product — AI avatars and digital twins, generated B-roll, AI video and images, music and sound effects, voice cloning, translation and lipdub. Whatever you spend on an avatar experiment is no longer available for gaze correction.
For someone who wants the whole suite, pooling is a feature: you spend where you need it. For someone whose only recurring job is fixing eye contact on talking-head clips, it makes the real cost per corrected minute hard to predict, because it depends on what else you did that month. Rollover softens this, but it caps at three months' worth, so credits do eventually expire.
It is also worth knowing where the product is heading. Captions operates as NOCAP, Inc. and its public presence increasingly runs through the Mirage brand, with the roadmap weighted toward generative video — AI actors, digital twins, prompt-to-video. That is a reasonable bet for them and says nothing bad about the eye contact tool. It does mean the feature you came for is a smaller share of what you are paying for over time.
What the alternatives look like
Every option here falls into one of three buckets: another subscription suite, something free with strings attached, or a focused single-purpose tool.
- Descript — the closest match on output quality and a far better editor if you work by transcript. Also a monthly subscription, and its eye contact effect handles only one person on screen.
- VEED — browser-based with a teleprompter alongside it, and it disables correction on frames where your gaze strays too far rather than forcing an unnatural result. Free plan allows a single use per account.
- CapCut — free gaze correction in the app, which is the honest floor if budget is the whole objection. Processing can be slow and availability has been uneven by region.
- Kapwing — convenient if your editing already happens in the browser, and subscription-gated the same way.
- NVIDIA Broadcast — free and real-time, but it needs an RTX GPU and targets live calls and streams, not files you already recorded.
- Media.io — genuinely pay-per-credit with no subscription, but its eye contact fixer is for photos, not video. Useful to know if what you actually need is a headshot fixed.
- GazeFix — single-purpose and pay-per-minute, with credits that never expire. No timeline, no monthly plan.
How to choose without overthinking it
Work backwards from how often you record, not from the feature grid. If you publish short-form video most weeks and shoot on your phone, Captions earns the $24.99 on workflow alone and you should stop reading. If you record talking-head video occasionally and gaze is the only thing you ever fix, a monthly plan with a shared credit pool is the wrong shape for the problem — you will pay in months you shoot nothing.
Two traps are worth naming. The first is paying for a second subscription because you forgot the suite you already own has the feature; check before you buy. The second is budgeting from a review site's pricing table — the numbers in this category go stale within months, and several currently-ranking comparisons are already wrong about Captions' entry price.
Where GazeFix fits
GazeFix is built for the narrow case a suite subscription serves worst: you want one button, occasionally, without a monthly commitment or a credit pool to ration. Drop a video in, check the before/after comparison, download it watermark-free at original resolution. One credit corrects one minute, and credits never expire.
It is a much narrower tool than Captions by design, and it is not on your phone's home screen. If you want avatars, translation, captions and a mobile-native editor, Captions is the better buy and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. GazeFix is live now — you can start with 1 free credit, no card required.