How Cadence works

The weekly rhythm, broken down.

Seven stages. One loop. Every week your pipeline pulls reels AND carousels from competitors, writes a Weekly Report, and hands you two batches of hooks ready to move through Hook Bank into a Kanban.

You bring your own API keys.

Cadence is the software. Scraping (Apify), scripts + carousel slides + hooks (OpenRouter), reel transcripts + embeddings (Google AI) all run on your keys, encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Every call logged with model + tokens + cost. Rotate or revoke any time.

Add competitors

Pick three to fifteen creators in your space. Paste their Instagram handles. Cadence resolves each one, pulls a profile preview, and tags them so you can group by niche or filter a report to a subset (max five per run).

Scrape the recent window

Trigger a scrape from the competitor's page. Two buttons, one per format: reels (hook, views, video URL) and carousels (cover slide, saves, slide count). Apify-backed, all public data. Re-run whenever the window slides.

Transcribe reels worth transcribing

Pick reels and Cadence sends the video to Gemini for an A/V script (visuals + audio beats, not just captions). Carousels skip transcription — caption + cover slide is the signal there. Auto-transcribe toggles default OFF so the API cost is opt-in per account.

A weekly strategist report

Pick the format (Reels, Carousels, or Both), the window, and up to five competitors. Cadence writes the report: top performers per format, three to five winning patterns, five reel hooks each with a 1-10 Voice Fit, five carousel hook seeds tagged narrative/method/case, drift vs last week, and one takeaway. Generate in any of six languages, regardless of the account default.

Hook Bank — your idea buffer

Send keepers from the report to Hook Bank — the private buffer between reports and the board. Tabs for Reels and Carousels, plus Scripted vs Non-scripted so you can see at a glance which hooks already have full scripts or slides. Append five more hooks at any point, capped at 20 per report so the strategist doesn't loop.

Expand into scripts or slides

From Hook Bank, expand a hook into the next stage. The same Voice Fit number you saw on the report follows the idea all the way to the Kanban — no second voice score, no drift.

Reel hooks — Expand to a full script + caption with a hook/body/payoff/CTA structure, written in your voice from your past posted hooks.
Carousel hook seeds — Slides generate on demand when you send to Hook Bank — six to nine slides built from the picked format (narrative, method, or case). No tokens spent on slides you'll never ship.

Move, schedule, publish

Promote a Hook Bank idea → it becomes a card on the Kanban board (Draft → Scheduled → Posted). Drop it on a date and a Google Calendar event is created on your primary calendar. Change the date later, the same event updates — no duplicates. Once posted, Cadence links the real post back to the card so next week's report can learn from it.

And the loop closes.

The reels and carousels you actually posted become part of the next report's input. Hooks that did well get remixed forward. Pinned hooks in Hook Bank carry into the next strategist run as creator-curated inspiration. Every run sharpens.

What Cadence isn't.

Not:
A video editorWe don't edit, upload, or host video. You edit where you already edit — we schedule what you're about to post.
Not:
A scheduler that posts for youInstagram's API doesn't make autoposting reliable for creators. Cadence lives on the planning side: what to make, when to make it, when it goes out.
Not:
A training dataset farmYour scripts, edits, and scraped data are yours. We don't train models on your content. We don't share it with third parties.

Your data stays yours

Tenant-isolated Postgres with row-level security. Your keys encrypted with AES-256-GCM.

Every cost visible

Each LLM run logs model, tokens, and cost. You see exactly what each report or idea batch costs.

BYOK, always

Apify, OpenRouter, Google AI — you connect the keys, you pay the providers. Cadence only charges for software.

Try it on three competitors.

Connect your keys, add three handles, generate your first report. Fifteen minutes end-to-end.

Start your workspace