About Phoenix Labs

Why Phoenix exists

Phoenix Labs makes video tools that bring old footage back without charging you rent for them. It was started by a computer science engineering graduate who'd rather stay anonymous. This is how it began, in their own words.

Where it started

I grew up in a developing country, in a family that never had much money to spare. When you grow up like that, you learn early what things really cost. A subscription isn't a small monthly charge. It's something else you go without.

I studied computer science engineering, and I wanted to use it to make a real difference, not just to get a job.

The tapes

Phoenix started with some old concert footage: VHS rips of shows from the 1980s that fans had shared online, the kind of recordings you can't find anywhere else. They were blurry, noisy and torn up by interlacing, and I wanted to see them properly.

So I paid a restoration service to clean them up. For my family, that was real money. What came back barely looked different from what I'd sent.

The software professionals use for this had just stopped selling a one-time licence. It's $299 a year now. For most people where I grew up, that's simply out of reach.

I had a degree, a computer and a lot of evenings. So I built my own.

What it turned into

The longer I worked on it, the clearer it got that old footage isn't just tapes. The video people care about most is often a phone clip from 2011, a camcorder recording or a DVD, and on a new screen it all looks like mush. It breaks in the same few ways: noise, interlacing, compression, and a picture too small for today's screens. Phoenix fixes those.

A lot of what people bring to Phoenix is the only recording of a moment that mattered to them. That's what it's for. It won't invent detail the camera never recorded, and I'd rather tell you that up front than sell you a miracle.

How that shaped Phoenix

• Pay once. Phoenix Upscaler is $129, one time, with every future update. No subscription and no credits.
• Use the computer you already have. It runs on NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards, on Windows and Linux. Getting AMD right took a lot of work, because not everyone owns the card the tutorials assume.
• No suitable computer? Pay per clip. Cloud Restore runs the same restoration on our GPUs. You see the price in dollars before you pay, and a job that fails is refunded.
• Your footage is yours. The desktop app never uploads anything. Cloud uploads are deleted automatically and never used to train a model.

Why there's no name here

I'd rather Phoenix be judged by what it does to your footage than by who made it or where they're from. So there's no name or photo on this page. There is a real person behind the support address, and every email reaches me.

The founder, Phoenix Labs

Phoenix Labs today

• Phoenix Upscaler: restore and upscale old video on your own PC, $129 once.
• Phoenix Cloud Restore: the same restoration on our GPUs, from $2.99 a clip.
• Phoenix Motion: turn a still image into a five-second video with sound, from $0.59 a clip.
• Phoenix Editor: cut long streams and recordings into edits and captioned Shorts, $99 with a year of updates.

Payments are handled by Lemon Squeezy, our Merchant of Record. Support: [email protected].

Questions