InVideo Review: Create Marketing Videos for $49 (AppSumo)

What Is InVideo and Who Is It For?

InVideo is a cloud-based video creation platform designed to help marketers and small business owners produce short promotional videos without needing professional editing skills. It was available on AppSumo as a lifetime deal starting at $49 for a single code, which gets you 30 videos per month with a three-minute maximum length.

The tool isn't trying to replace desktop powerhouses like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. If you're already comfortable editing video with professional software, InVideo will feel limited. But if you've never touched a video editor and need Instagram promos, short ads, or quick branded content, this is squarely aimed at you.

AppSumo's stacking model lets you purchase up to five codes. At five codes ($245 total), you unlock unlimited videos per month, three user seats, and videos up to 10 minutes long. For context, Final Cut Pro costs around $300 as a one-time purchase, so the pricing gets into comparable territory at higher tiers — though the tools serve very different audiences.

Two Video Modes: Storyteller vs. Quick Video

InVideo offers two distinct creation workflows, though the naming could use some work. The first is called "Storyteller," which is designed for turning written content — like a blog post or script — into a video. You paste in your text, add line breaks where you want scene changes, and InVideo attempts to match your words with relevant stock photos and videos.

The second mode is "Quick Video," which is more template-driven and geared toward short promotional content like Instagram posts, bumper ads, and product videos. This mode feels more polished for its intended purpose, letting you swap in your own footage, add branding, and produce something presentable in just a few minutes.

The fundamental difference matters: Storyteller tries to automate the creative process by reading your script, while Quick Video gives you a structured template to fill in. For most marketing use cases, Quick Video is the stronger option.

Building a Storyteller Video: The Hands-On Experience

Creating a Storyteller video starts with choosing a template, which is worth taking your time on since switching templates mid-project isn't straightforward. After selecting a template and format (like Instagram's square 1:1), you paste in your script and let InVideo try to match scenes with appropriate stock imagery.

The auto-matching is hit or miss. InVideo reads keywords from your text and pulls in related photos, but the results can be off-target. In testing with a script about mothers, the tool grabbed a photo where nobody was smiling and no mothers were visible. It also has a habit of reusing the same image across multiple scenes when the text contains similar words.

Text handling is one of the bigger pain points. Default text sizing tends to be too small for longer sentences, and resizing the text box to make things readable requires a fair amount of manual adjustment. The editor gives you control over colors, animations, voiceovers, and overlays, but each edit requires waiting for previews to generate, which slows the workflow considerably.

The Editor: What You Can (and Can't) Do

InVideo's scene editor offers a reasonable set of tools for a browser-based app. You can resize and reposition text, change colors (though only via RGB — no hex input, which is frustrating for brand work), add voiceovers by recording directly or uploading files, and apply overlays for texture and motion effects.

Image handling includes options for fit-with-blur, fit-with-transparent, cropped, or manual crop modes. The manual crop works well for framing shots exactly how you want them. Animations let you add fade-ins, zoom effects, and directional transitions, though these can introduce slight glitching between scenes rather than smooth crossfades.

What's missing is the kind of layering control you'd expect from dedicated design tools. You can't reorder layers to put an icon behind text, for instance. Stickers (icons) have limited positioning options and you can't change their color. The overall editing experience works, but it requires patience — everything takes a beat longer to load and render than you'd want.

Stock Media Library: The Premium Problem

The stock media library is one of InVideo's weaker points. While there's a decent selection available, the higher-quality clips — particularly anything featuring real people — are marked as premium content with a crown icon. These premium videos are not included with the AppSumo lifetime deal.

With premium content filtered out, search results skew toward generic nature footage, abstract clips, and lower-quality options. Searching for "mother" returned ocean views and plants rather than relevant family content. The free stock video that is available tends to be basic, sometimes out of focus, and not particularly inspiring.

To access premium videos, you'd need to subscribe to their enterprise plan at $10/month (billed annually), which gives you 60 premium videos per month on top of your lifetime deal. It's worth noting that other video tools in the market include higher-quality stock libraries as part of their base offering, so this feels like a gap.

Quick Video Mode: Where InVideo Shines

The Quick Video mode is where InVideo earns its keep. For creating short, template-based promotional content — think Instagram posts, short ads, and branded clips — the workflow is genuinely faster and more intuitive than firing up a full editing suite.

Uploading your own footage works smoothly, though MOV files may not show a preview (converting to MP4 via Handbrake solves this). The drag-and-drop interface lets you replace template media easily: drag your clip onto the existing one and choose whether to replace it, add it as a layer, or insert it behind the current scene.

Template customization is straightforward. You can swap logos, change fonts (Montserrat and many others are available), edit text, and adjust positioning with simple drag controls. A practical test creating an Instagram fitness video produced a clean, professional-looking result in just a few minutes. For anyone who needs branded social content on a regular basis, this mode alone could justify the purchase.

Brand Presets and Social Publishing

InVideo includes a brand presets feature where you can save your brand colors, logo, social profiles, and end clips. At the time of review, only a single brand preset was supported, though the plural naming and roadmap suggest multi-brand support is coming. For agencies or anyone managing multiple brands, this would be a significant addition.

The platform also supports connecting social accounts for direct publishing from the app, which saves the extra step of downloading and re-uploading your finished videos. Reseller rights are included with the AppSumo deal, meaning you can create videos for clients and charge for the service — a nice touch for freelancers and agencies.

Other included features worth noting: custom font uploads, no InVideo branding on your exports, full HD resolution output, and all future upgrades included with the lifetime deal.

The Team Behind InVideo

One of the strongest signals for any lifetime deal is the team's responsiveness, and InVideo scores well here. The founders actively responded to user feedback during the AppSumo launch, adding features like a toggle to hide premium videos, custom music uploads, and expanded stock music — all based on community requests.

The in-app chat support was responsive when issues arose with code redemption, and the 147 five-taco reviews on AppSumo at the time of review reflected genuine user satisfaction. This kind of active development and communication is exactly what you want to see in an early-stage lifetime deal: a motivated team using the funding to rapidly improve their product.

The promotional emails were frequent but focused on gathering feedback rather than upselling, which is a refreshing approach compared to many SaaS companies.

Final Verdict: Rating 6.5/10

InVideo lands at a 6.5 out of 10. The browser-based interface is slower than desktop editing tools, and the Storyteller mode requires significant manual tweaking to produce polished results. The stock media library leans heavily on premium content that isn't included with the deal, and the text editing controls could be more refined.

That said, for people who don't have video editing experience and need to produce social media marketing content, InVideo is a practical solution. The Quick Video templates are genuinely useful, the drag-and-drop workflow is accessible, and the lifetime pricing makes it a low-risk investment.

If you're already proficient with Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, this probably won't replace your existing workflow. But if you need to delegate video creation to team members who aren't editors, or you just want a fast way to produce Instagram and Facebook ad content, InVideo is worth a look — especially at the single-code $49 price point. Just don't expect it to handle complex, long-form video projects.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.