About TapeSave
TapeSave is a small, family-funded software team in Louisiana. We built TapeSave after digitizing our own VHS, 8mm, and Hi8 tapes and discovering that the part everyone talks about — the tape transfer — is the easy part. The hard part is what happens next: hours of fast-forwarding through one giant file per tape, trying to remember when a recital happened, whether that backyard birthday was 1989 or 1991, and which scenes are worth keeping.
Almost every family we've talked to has the same experience: they spend hundreds of dollars on Legacybox, Costco, iMemories, or a local shop, get a USB drive back, plug it in once, look at the giant unorganized files, and put it in a drawer. The tapes got digitized. The memories didn't actually get saved.
Who built this
TapeSave is built and run by a practicing physician in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who is also a long-time software builder. They write the code, answer the support email at [email protected], and run every single tape through the pipeline before shipping any change. The medical background isn't irrelevant: a lot of TapeSave's users are grown children digitizing tapes that belonged to a parent who has died or who is losing memory. The product is built to be gentle with that.
How TapeSave actually works
You upload a digitized file — from any service or any DIY capture — and our pipeline does four things:
- Scene detection. An AI vision model walks the video frame-by-frame to find the real cuts between recordings — birthday to vacation, recital to backyard.
- Date recovery. Most camcorders burned the date into a corner of the frame. We OCR those timestamps and stamp each clip with its true recording date, so clips land in the correct year in any cloud photo library.
- Dead-space removal. Static, blue screens, long stretches of an empty room — gone.
- Plain-English labels.Each clip gets a short description (“Outdoor birthday party with children”, “School recital with audience”) so you can scan a list instead of scrubbing video.
How we handle your files
- Files are encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest on Cloudflare R2.
- Uploads are automatically deleted 30 days after processing. We do not keep your family videos.
- We never use your videos to train any model — yours or anyone else's.
- Payments are handled by Stripe; we never see card numbers.
- We do not mail-in tapes and we do not handle physical media. Your originals stay with you.
How our guides are written
Every guide on this site comes from doing the thing, not researching the thing. We've run our own family's archive — film reels going back to the 1950s and multiple shoeboxes of camcorder tapes — through the exact pipeline our customers use, and the advice in our guides is what we learned the hard way: which formats fail first, what to ask a transfer counter for, why DVDs are the wrong deliverable.
- Guides are drafted with the help of AI writing tools and then reviewed, corrected, and edited by the founder before publishing. Nothing goes live unread.
- Comparison pages use competitors' published prices and policies, rechecked periodically. No company can pay to change how we describe them.
- Pages show their publish date, and substantive updates change the page's modified date.
Corrections
Spotted something wrong — an outdated price, a format detail, a broken step? Email [email protected] with “Correction” in the subject. We fix verified errors within a few days and update the page's modified date so the change is on the record.
Ownership & how we make money
TapeSave is independently owned and family-funded. No outside investors, no private equity, no parent company with an agenda. We make money exactly two ways:
- Customer orders — the $9.99-per-video service and its packs and add-ons. This is the business.
- A clearly-labeled sponsor slot — one optional sponsor message on the processing wait screen, always marked as sponsored.
We never sell or share customer data, and your videos are never used for anything except making your clips.
Affiliate disclosure
TapeSave never touches physical tapes, so when a visitor still needs their tapes digitized, the honest answer is to point them to a service that does that step. Those outbound links — currently to Legacybox — are plain, unpaid recommendations: TapeSave has no active affiliate relationships and earns nothing if you order through them. (We briefly ran a Legacybox affiliate program; it ended in August 2026.)
Two promises: if we ever join an affiliate program again, every paid link will be labeled with a disclosure right next to it, and a commission will never change what we recommend — our comparison pages say the same things about Legacybox whether or not a link pays us.
How to reach us
Real humans, fast replies — usually within a day, often same-day.
- Email: [email protected] — anything billing, technical, or just a question
- Press & partnerships: [email protected]
- Or just upload a file and reply to the order email if anything looks off.
Ready to actually finish the job?
Upload one digitized file and get dated, labeled clips in minutes. $9.99 per video. No subscription.
Start preserving — $9.99