About
Who builds Tinulo, and why it works the way it does.
Last updated: 2026-08-05
Why this exists
I spent a few years doing freelance short-form video. The work itself was fine. What wore me down was the shape of it: a thirty-second cut meant one tool to generate a clip, another to fix a frame, a third to upscale it, a fourth to stitch, and a running note somewhere with the prompt I had used last time and would otherwise forget.
None of those steps were hard. Moving between them was. Every hop meant re-uploading an asset, re-typing a prompt, and losing the settings that had produced the thing I liked.
Tinulo is the workspace I wanted then. Video and image generation, reusable presets, and the library all sit in one place. Every job keeps the prompt and settings that produced it, so a result you like is something you can return to instead of reconstructing from memory.
How it works, and what that costs
Generation runs on credits. The part that matters to me is that you see what a job costs before you run it, next to the button — duration, resolution, and model all move that number. I have used enough tools that bill you first and explain afterwards to not want to build another one.
Two policies follow from the same idea:
- Credits included with a plan reset each month. Credits you buy outright never expire.
- You can cancel at any time, with no conditions attached to how much you have used.
If a job fails, the credits go back to your balance automatically and the failure shows a reason and a retry.
On the presets
Most of the difficulty in generative video is not the model — it is knowing what to write and which settings to pair it with. The preset library is where that knowledge goes: named, one-click starting points that carry a working prompt and configuration. Start from one, then change whatever you want. Nothing is hidden; you can always open a preset and see exactly what it set.
About the name
A kiln takes raw material and finishes it. That is roughly what this does, and the mark is an aperture for the same reason — something goes in, something finished comes out.
Writing
I write about diffusion model behavior, motion consistency across shots, and the places generative pipelines tend to break — usually the seams between tools rather than the tools themselves. Those notes are on the blog.