Friends & tools we use
FrameThrower is a search engine for cinematography reference — 409,000 frames from 5,489 films. It is built almost entirely out of other people’s excellent work. Everything on this page is something we actually run in production, with a note on what it does for us. Nothing is here as a favour.
Infrastructure
Where it runs and what keeps it up.
- Next.js
The whole application — App Router, server components, the lot.
- Vercel
Hosting and deploys. Every push to main is live in about two minutes.
- Qdrant
The vector database behind every search. Four vectors per frame across 409,000 of them.
- Neon
Serverless Postgres for accounts, lookbooks and billing.
- Cloudflare
R2 stores every frame, thumbnail and depth map — about 120 GB — and serves them.
- Modal
GPU batch jobs. It generated depth maps for all 409,000 frames in under an hour.
- Hetzner
The bare-metal boxes that did the original frame extraction.
- Prisma
The ORM and every migration.
- Stripe
Subscriptions, seats and the customer portal.
- Better Auth
Sign-in, sessions and the OAuth server our MCP clients authenticate against.
- Resend
Transactional email — magic links, receipts, invites.
- Upstash
Redis for the embedding cache. It took a 60-second search down to 2.5.
Built with
The pieces the product is made of.
- tldraw
The canvas you arrange references on. Genuinely excellent.
- ComfyUI
Our node drops a frame and its depth map straight onto the graph.
- Model Context Protocol
How agents talk to our library. We run an MCP server with OAuth.
- Google Gemini
Embeddings for every frame, and the vision model that described them.
- Claude
Used daily to build this, and one of the clients our MCP server serves.
- Sharp
Every thumbnail and tile variant.
- TMDB
Film metadata — titles, years, directors, posters.
Community
Worth your time if you work in this corner of the industry.
- Curious Refuge
AI filmmaking education. The best starting point we know of.
- Awesome SEO Backlinks
The list we worked through to get FrameThrower found at all.
Built something we use, or something our users would want? Tell us at contact@framethrower.ai. We only list tools we genuinely use, so the honest answer is sometimes no.
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