Meet 5AM

If you ship media for a living, your day probably looks something like this: raw footage on one drive, renders on another, references in Drive, mood boards in Notion, a paid model in one browser tab, an editor in another, a host somewhere else, and an invoice you keep meaning to send. The work is creative. The plumbing isn't.

5AM is the plumbing — collapsed into one place. Store your library, edit it, generate new material with AI, share it with clients, and get paid for it. Browser or terminal, your choice. Here's the actual tour.

One library, any format

Albums hold photos, videos, and audio. Upload from the web, drag a folder onto the CLI, or let an AI agent push renders in overnight. Either way, everything lands in the same library with thumbnails, EXIF, and AI-generated descriptions you can search semantically — "dog on a beach at sunset" finds the file, even if you named it IMG_4421.HEIC.

Video doesn't have a file-size ceiling. We use presigned uploads straight to cloud storage, so your browser isn't reading a 12 GB master file into memory and praying. Quotas are visible and enforced up front — no surprise overages.

Editing that doesn't fight you

The image viewer is built for the gesture you actually use: pinch to zoom, drag to pan, double-tap to jump in. Crop has the aspect ratios you ship to (1:1, 16:9, 9:16, 4:3, 3:4, or free). Tone curves run on the GPU. Filters, text overlay, the usual basics — fast.

The interesting one is Magic Eraser. Tap the thing you want gone, the server runs custom AI model to mask it, Imagen fills in what should have been there. Object disappears. The heavy model work happens server-side, so your browser stays responsive while it runs.

Video gets a timeline editor with the processing pipeline pushed into Web Workers so the UI doesn't stutter. Trim, cut, join, mute, replace audio. .mov files auto-convert to .mp4 on upload so nothing breaks on the way out.

AI Studio, no lock-in

Generate images and video from prompts using the models you'd pick anyway: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Imagen 3, Imagen Ultra, DALL·E 3, Veo 3, Veo 3.1.

The angle that matters: bring your own API keys. We don't mark up token usage. Plug in your Google or OpenAI credentials, generate at provider rates, and the output drops straight into your library — ready to crop, color, or composite into the next thing.

The CLI

If you've automated anything, you'll like this part. The 5am CLI is a single Go binary, cross-platform, JSON by default. It's built to be piped — into jq, into shell loops, into AI agents like Claude Code or Gemini CLI.

# Back up a shoot and print the share link
ALBUM=$(5am albums create --name "Shoot $(date +%F)" | jq -r .id)
5am media upload ./renders -r --include '*.jpg,*.mp4,*.mov' \
  --album "$ALBUM" --concurrency 8
echo "https://5am.app/album/$ALBUM"

Three lines, no GUI. Uploads parallelize with a configurable worker pool, big videos use presigned URLs under the hood, progress streams to stderr so your JSON pipes stay clean.

There's a longer write-up if you want it: Introducing the 5am CLI.

Share it. Sell it. Keep the money.

Three ways to share an album:

• Direct — invite collaborators by email with view, comment, or contribute access. Good for clients and teams.
• Public link — share a URL, optionally protected by a token. Good for portfolios and one-off handoffs.
• Paid access — set a price, share the link, get paid when someone buys access. Good for selling presets, stock packs, cuts, or whole collections.

Payments run through Stripe, and payouts go to your bank via Stripe Connect. You set the price, you keep the money. We're not a marketplace taking a cut on top of the card fees.

Pricing

Everything you need to get started — library, editing, AI Studio with your own keys, and the CLI — works on the Free tier, which includes 10 GB of storage at no cost.

If you need more space or want to unlock features like AI characters, check out all the details on our pricing page.

Where to start

If you want to poke around, sign in and create your first album in about thirty seconds. If you'd rather start from the terminal, the CLI page has install one-liners for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

If you build something interesting, we'd like to see it.