VidMage Video Face Swap is now listed on AIxploria, the AI tools directory that catalogues thousands of AI sites across more than fifty categories. The new card files the tool under Face Swap & DeepFake, where it currently sits at number forty-three, prices it “Free-Trial”, rates it 4.5 out of 5 and stamps it with a Verified Tool badge alongside the directory’s “new AI tool” flag. For a face swap product competing in one of the most crowded categories on the web, that is a respectable arrival.
The card is short, as directory cards always are. It describes a tool that swaps a face in a video or a photo “quickly and without a watermark”, works on GIFs and group shots, tracks up to four people separately, and preserves expressions, head movements and lighting frame by frame. All of that is accurate. What the card cannot tell you is what the thing costs once you look past the free trial, how the credit maths actually works, or which laws changed this year that make casually swapping a face into a company video a materially riskier act than it was twelve months ago.
Our AI models and tools hub tracks arrivals like this one, and we ran the same exercise on the two most recent entries in this series: Gemini 3.5 Transcribe yesterday and, last week, Claude Academy. This article does what a directory card cannot: it explains what the tool does, what it costs per second of finished footage, how the star rating was actually calculated, and what a UK or EU business has to have in place before it publishes anything made with it.
Every figure quoted here comes from the AIxploria listing, VidMage’s own product and pricing pages, or published legislation and European Commission guidance, all checked on 27 August 2026. Where a number is our arithmetic on those figures, we say so.
Table of contents
- What VidMage Video Face Swap Actually Does
- VidMage on AIxploria: What the Listing Says
- What VidMage Costs Once You Do the Arithmetic
- The VidMage Free Tier Is Real, and It Is Small
- How VidMage Compares With the Alternatives AIxploria Lists
- What VidMage Video Face Swap Means for Your Business
- The Consent and Compliance Problem You Cannot Outsource
- Where VidMage Falls Short
- Frequently Asked Questions
- References
What VidMage Video Face Swap Actually Does
VidMage is a face replacement tool with a web app and a Mac desktop app sharing one account. You upload a source clip, upload a photo of the face you want in it, and the system re-renders the video with the new face in place. The output carries no watermark, even on the free tier, which is the single feature the directory card leads with and the one most competing tools reserve for paying users.
Frame-by-frame tracking, not a pasted still
The technical claim underneath the marketing is specific and checkable, and it rests on a well-established computer vision technique: VidMage says it tracks 478 facial landmarks on every frame, then blends the replacement face onto each one, so expressions, head turns and lighting changes carry through rather than producing the flat, pasted-on look that early face swap tools were notorious for. Put that number against real footage and it stops being abstract. A sixty-second clip at thirty frames per second is 1,800 frames, so a single minute of video involves roughly 860,400 landmark placements — our arithmetic on VidMage’s stated figure. That is the whole job in one number.
Four faces, tracked separately
Group shots are where most face swap tools give up. VidMage handles up to four different faces in the same clip, each tracked independently, with a separate target face supplied for each person. Birthday montages, two-hander dialogue scenes and team intros are the use cases the vendor names. The four-face ceiling is a real limit rather than a soft one, and it is lower than at least one competitor on the same AIxploria page, DeepSwap, which advertises six.
Where the Mac app changes the limits
The web tool and the Mac app are not the same product with different skins. The Mac build runs on Apple Silicon from M1 upward, processes entirely on the device, handles clips up to 300 seconds and files up to 1,024MB, exports at up to 4K, and offers a real-time virtual camera that puts a swapped face into Zoom, Google Meet, FaceTime, OBS or Discord. Nothing leaves the machine. For anyone working with client footage or unreleased material, that distinction matters more than any accuracy claim on the page.
The formats and the ceilings
VidMage accepts MP4, MOV and M4V. Paid web accounts get up to 4K, files to 1GB and clips to five minutes; the free web tier is capped at twenty seconds of video a day, fifteen photo swaps a day and two GIFs. On the Mac side, the free tier allows five minutes a day of watermarked live swapping and a fifteen-second preview per video.
| Capability | What VidMage does | Documented limit |
|---|---|---|
| Face tracking | 478 facial landmarks resolved on every frame | Vendor figure, not independently benchmarked |
| Faces per clip | Swaps several people in one render, tracked separately | Up to 4 |
| Clip length | Single-file video face swap | 300 seconds paid; 20 seconds a day free |
| Output resolution | Preserves the source resolution, no forced downscale | Up to 4K on the Mac app |
| File size | Direct upload, no manual splitting | 1GB web, 1,024MB Mac |
| Local processing | Renders on your own machine, nothing uploaded | Mac app only, Apple Silicon M1+ |
| Live virtual camera | Swapped face in Zoom, Meet, FaceTime, OBS, Discord | Mac only; free tier watermarked, 5 min a day |
| Watermark | No logo or stamp on output at any tier | Except the free Mac live swap |
VidMage on AIxploria: What the Listing Says
AIxploria is a discovery directory, not an evaluator. Its job is to tell you a tool exists and roughly what it is for, and on that narrow brief the VidMage card does well. It is still worth reading closely, because for a large audience this card is the first and only thing they will ever read about the product.
The entry itself
The listing sits in Face Swap & DeepFake at number forty-three, carries the Verified Tool badge and the “new AI tool” flag, and is priced “Free-Trial” rather than free or freemium. Its trend counter reads 8,475 and it has collected 49 upvotes. The useful-links panel points at the official site, the about page, a testimonials page, the pricing page and a YouTube video — which is more first-party detail than most cards in this category carry, and a mild positive signal on its own.
Read the vote count, not the star rating
Here is the detail almost nobody checks, and it is buried in the page’s structured data rather than shown on screen. That 4.5 out of 5 is computed from two votes. Not two hundred, not twenty. Two. The rating is not dishonest — it is simply not evidence, and it will move the moment a hundred people rate the tool.
The same page shows 49 upvotes, so roughly twenty-four times as many visitors clicked the thumb as filled in a rating. Treat the badge as a visibility signal and the star as noise until the sample grows. We made the identical point when Gemini 3.5 Transcribe landed on a rating built from four votes.
Why the star tells you nothing here in particular
Look at the eight alternatives AIxploria itself suggests on the VidMage page and the problem becomes obvious. DeepSwapFace, Mango AI, Live3D AI Face Swap, KreadoAI FaceSwap and Video Face Swap are all rated 4.5. Face AI is 4.4, DeepSwap is 4.0, Swapface is 5.0. Average those eight and you get 4.49 — our arithmetic — which is to say VidMage’s 4.5 is precisely the category average, in a category where every entry clusters within half a point of every other entry. A metric on which everyone scores the same is not a metric.
What number forty-three actually buys
Face Swap & DeepFake is a commodity-heavy category, and forty-third place in it is a starting position rather than a ranking. What the listing genuinely buys VidMage is discovery: an audience that browses directories rather than product blogs, and a Verified Tool badge that separates it from the long tail of abandoned face swap sites. What it does not buy is any assessment of output quality, data handling or legal fitness, because AIxploria does not test for those and has never claimed to.
What VidMage Costs Once You Do the Arithmetic
VidMage publishes its full price list, which is more than many tools in this category manage. The list is also where the marketing and the maths stop agreeing.
The published plans
There are two subscriptions and one free tier. The monthly plan is $14.99 and includes 400 credits a month. The yearly plan bills at $8.33 a month, which is $99.96 for the year, and includes the same 400 credits a month. Both unlock the premium web features, the Mac facial-feature swap, unlimited live face swapping and unlimited preview time. The free tier includes zero credits and works only within the daily web and Mac allowances.
What 400 credits actually buys
Credits are the unit that matters, and VidMage’s rate card is simple: one credit per second of video face swap, one credit per photo, one credit per second of GIF, and five credits for a head swap. So 400 credits a month is 400 seconds of finished video — six minutes and forty seconds. On the $14.99 monthly plan that works out at $0.0375 per second, or 3.7 cents; on the yearly plan it is $0.0208 per second. Both are our arithmetic on VidMage’s published numbers.
The practical read is that a subscription is a social-clip budget, not a video-production budget. Six sixty-second clips a month exhausts it with forty credits to spare, and a single five-minute piece eats three-quarters of the allowance in one render.
Top-up credits and the tier that finally hits a penny
Subscribers can buy extra credits, and the ladder is steep: 500 credits for $9.99, 2,600 for $39.99, 16,000 for $199.99 and 50,000 for $499.99, which VidMage states as 50, 65, 80 and 100 credits per dollar respectively. Since one credit is one second of video, those rates convert directly into a price per second of finished footage: 2.0 cents, 1.5 cents, 1.3 cents and 1.0 cent. Unused credits never expire while the subscription stays active, which softens the up-front commitment but does not remove it.
The “from $0.01 per second” claim does not survive the price list
VidMage’s own comparison table advertises “from $0.01 per second” and, further down the same page, puts its price per video second at “~$0.006” against “~$0.01 to $0.05” for rival tools. The first claim is technically true and reachable exactly once: at 100 credits per dollar, which requires a $499.99 purchase on top of an active subscription.
The second claim is not reachable at all. No published VidMage tier produces $0.006 per second — that would need about 167 credits per dollar, and the most generous published rate is 100. On the entry-level monthly plan the real figure is 3.7 cents, which sits near the top of the $0.01–$0.05 band the vendor uses to describe everyone else.
| Route | Price | Credits | Cost per video second |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | $0 | 0 (daily allowance only) | Free, 20 seconds a day |
| Monthly plan | $14.99/month | 400/month | $0.0375 |
| Yearly plan | $8.33/month ($99.96/year) | 400/month | $0.0208 |
| Top-up pack | $9.99 | 500 | $0.0200 |
| Top-up pack | $39.99 | 2,600 | $0.0154 |
| Top-up pack | $199.99 | 16,000 | $0.0125 |
| Top-up pack | $499.99 | 50,000 | $0.0100 |
The VidMage Free Tier Is Real, and It Is Small
Free trials in this category are usually a bait-and-switch: you get a result, and it arrives stamped with a logo you have to pay to remove. VidMage does not do that, and the difference is worth naming plainly.
Twenty seconds a day, with no logo on the output
The web free tier gives twenty seconds of video face swap a day, fifteen photo swaps a day and two GIF swaps a day, with no account required and no watermark on what comes out. Twenty seconds a day is 7,300 seconds a year, which is a little over two hours of finished video annually at zero cost — our arithmetic, and a genuinely useful allowance for anyone testing rather than producing. The catch is the shape of it: you cannot bank the allowance, so a single sixty-second clip takes three days of free quota, split into three separate renders that will not stitch cleanly.
What the free tier is genuinely good for
Evaluation, and nothing else. Twenty seconds is enough to see whether the tracking holds on your own footage — your lighting, your camera, your subject’s head movements — which is the only test that matters and the one no benchmark can do for you. Run three or four of your own worst-case clips through it before you put a card down. If the tool cannot hold a face through a fast head turn in your material, no rating on any directory changes that.
How VidMage Compares With the Alternatives AIxploria Lists
The directory’s own “alternatives” panel is a useful reality check, because it shows exactly which shelf the tool has been put on.
The directory’s own shortlist
AIxploria suggests eight alternatives on the VidMage page: DeepSwapFace, Mango AI, Face AI, Live3D AI Face Swap, DeepSwap, Swapface, KreadoAI FaceSwap and Video Face Swap. Five are marked free, three freemium. Several make the same headline promises VidMage does — no registration, no watermark, multiple faces, GIF support — which tells you that in this category those features are table stakes rather than differentiators, and that the real separation happens on output quality, limits and data handling.
Ratings that say nothing, upvotes that say a little
Since the star ratings are indistinguishable, the upvote counts are the only crowd signal on the page with any spread in it. They range from 10 to 90, and VidMage’s 49 sits below the eight-alternative average of 65.6 — our arithmetic. That gap deserves an obvious caveat: every one of those alternatives has been listed for longer, and upvotes accumulate over time. A new arrival at 49 is not behind on merit; it is behind on months.
The one differentiator that is hard to copy
Strip out the table stakes and one feature is left standing: local processing on the Mac app. Every web-based rival on that list uploads your footage to a server, and most of them say nothing at all about what happens to it afterwards. A tool that renders entirely on your own hardware is not competing on accuracy — it is competing on a data protection question, and it is the only one on the page that can answer it with “the file never left the building”.
| Tool on the AIxploria card | Pricing label | Rating | Upvotes |
|---|---|---|---|
| VidMage Video Face Swap | Free-Trial | 4.5 (from 2 votes) | 49 |
| DeepSwapFace | Free | 4.5 | 90 |
| Mango AI | Freemium | 4.5 | 85 |
| Live3D AI Face Swap | Free | 4.5 | 84 |
| Video Face Swap | Free | 4.5 | 76 |
| KreadoAI FaceSwap | Freemium | 4.5 | 79 |
| Face AI | Free | 4.4 | 65 |
| Swapface | Free | 5.0 | 36 |
| DeepSwap | Freemium | 4.0 | 10 |
What VidMage Video Face Swap Means for Your Business
Face replacement has an image problem, and most of it is deserved. But strip away the novelty and there are three ordinary commercial jobs this class of tool does cheaply, and one it makes considerably more dangerous.
Content localisation and the cost of a reshoot
The genuine commercial case is variation without a reshoot. A brand with one piece of studio footage and four regional markets currently pays for four shoots or accepts one generic asset. Swapping the on-camera presenter costs 1 credit per second — about $11.25 for a five-minute film on the monthly plan, our arithmetic — against a day rate, a crew and a studio. That is a real saving, and it is legitimate provided every presenter whose face appears has agreed in writing to appear in that specific context.
Privacy on camera, which is a smaller idea than it sounds
The Mac app’s live virtual camera lets someone join a video call wearing a different face. There are defensible uses — a whistleblower interview, a witness recording, a support agent who does not want a customer to recognise them in the street — and there are obvious abuses. If your organisation allows it at all, allow it by named exception with a documented reason, not as a general setting people discover for themselves.
Prototyping and internal work
The third job is the least glamorous and the safest: internal previsualisation. Testing whether a concept works before booking talent, checking a shot composition, building a rough cut to get sign-off. Nothing leaves the company, no one is misrepresented, and the twenty-second free tier covers most of it. If you are going to let a team try VidMage at all, this is the sandbox to point them at first.
The job it makes more dangerous
Impersonation. A convincing face swap in the hands of someone running a business email compromise or a vishing call is a materially better attack than it was, and the barrier to entry is now twenty seconds a day and no account. We covered the detection side of this problem when TikTok shipped AI likeness detection and again when Google put visible watermarks behind SynthID Verify. Assume your staff will be targeted with synthetic video this year, and make video-call identity verification part of your finance approval process rather than a training slide.
The Consent and Compliance Problem You Cannot Outsource
This is the part of the story a directory card will never carry, and it is the part that decides whether a business can use VidMage at all. Two separate legal regimes moved this year, and both land on the organisation publishing the content rather than on the tool that made it.
The EU AI Act clock started on 2 August 2026
Article 50 of the EU AI Act — the transparency article — became applicable on 2 August 2026, twenty-five days before this article was published. It defines a deepfake at Article 3(60) as AI-generated or manipulated image, audio or video content resembling real people, places or events that would falsely appear authentic. Deployers of systems producing such content must disclose that it is artificially generated or manipulated. Crucially, the obligation applies without any intent to deceive: a harmless, obviously comic face swap posted by an EU-facing business still needs to be labelled. Non-compliance carries fines of up to €15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover.
The narrow grace period, and who it does not cover
There is a limited grace period, and it is easy to misread. It applies only to the Article 50(2) machine-readable marking and detection obligation, only for systems already on the market before 2 August 2026, and it runs out on 2 December 2026. It does not extend the deployer’s disclosure duty, which is live now. We set out the labelling rules in more detail when the EU published its AI content label rules, and the wider obligations sit in our EU AI Act compliance checklist for UK companies.
The UK criminal offence that arrived in February
The UK route is criminal rather than regulatory. Section 138 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 came into force on 6 February 2026 and amended the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to create an offence of creating, or requesting the creation of, a purported intimate image of an adult without consent. Parliament deliberately removed any requirement to prove intent to cause harm or humiliation, so a prosecution turns on consent alone. The penalty is imprisonment or an unlimited fine, or both. The same statute reshaped UK data protection more broadly, which we covered in our guide to what the DUAA changed for businesses.
UK GDPR and the target face
Separately from all of that, the photograph you upload as the target face is personal data about an identifiable living person, and processing it needs a lawful basis. A face swap performed on an employee, a customer or a member of the public without their agreement is a processing operation you would struggle to justify on any basis other than consent — and consent, under UK GDPR, has to be specific, informed and freely given. An employee cannot meaningfully consent under pressure from a manager who wants the video finished by Friday.
What VidMage’s own terms require of you
To be fair to the vendor, the terms are unambiguous. VidMage restricts the tools to creative and entertainment purposes, requires that users upload only media they own or have explicit permission to use, prohibits sexual, explicit, misleading and non-consensual content on pain of account termination, and reviews abuse reports within 24 hours. It also states that uploads are deleted within two hours, are never used to train models, and travel over an encrypted connection. Those are good terms. They are also a contract you are agreeing to police yourself.
| Obligation | Source | Who it lands on | Live from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disclose that video content is AI-manipulated | EU AI Act, Article 50(4) | The deployer — the business publishing it | 2 Aug 2026 |
| Machine-readable marking of generated output | EU AI Act, Article 50(2) | The provider — the tool vendor | 2 Aug 2026; 2 Dec 2026 for pre-existing systems |
| Do not create a purported intimate image without consent | DUAA 2025 s.138, amending SOA 2003 | The individual — a criminal offence | 6 Feb 2026 |
| Lawful basis for processing a person’s face | UK GDPR | The controller — your organisation | In force |
| Upload only media you own or may use | VidMage terms of service | The account holder | On sign-up |
Write it into the policy before anyone opens the app
None of this needs a legal department, but it does need one page in writing: who may use face replacement tools, for what, with whose written permission, and how the output gets labelled before it is published. That page belongs in the same document as the rest of your generative-AI rules — our AI acceptable use policy template has the structure. Write it before the first person on your team discovers a tool that does this for free in twenty-second bursts, not after.
Where VidMage Falls Short
An honest read of a launch needs a limitations list, and this one has five entries worth stating plainly.
First, the accuracy claims are entirely first-party. The 478-landmark figure, the “superior facial clarity” comparison and the 4.9 self-reported rating all come from VidMage’s own marketing, and there is no independent benchmark for face swap fidelity of the kind that exists for speech recognition or language models. You have only your own eyes and your own footage.
Second, the vendor’s price-per-second claim does not reconcile with the vendor’s own price list, as set out above. That is the sort of discrepancy that should make you check every other number on the page.
Third, the credit allowance is small relative to how it is marketed. Six minutes and forty seconds of video a month is a social-media budget, not a production budget, and the gap is filled by top-up packs that only get genuinely cheap at $499.99.
Fourth, the best features are Mac-only. Local processing, real-time swapping, facial-feature swapping and the 4K path all require Apple Silicon. A Windows-based team gets the web tool and its upload-to-server model, which is precisely the model the privacy pitch is arguing against.
Fifth, the four-face ceiling and the five-minute clip limit will bite on real projects sooner than they sound like they will, and there is no documented way to raise either.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is VidMage free?
There is a genuinely free tier with no account required: twenty seconds of video face swap a day, fifteen photo swaps and two GIF swaps, with no watermark on the output. Paid plans start at $14.99 a month, or $8.33 a month billed annually, and both include 400 credits. AIxploria’s “Free-Trial” label is therefore accurate — the free allowance is real but strictly a trial.
How much does VidMage cost per second of video?
One credit buys one second of video face swap. On the $14.99 monthly plan that is $0.0375 a second, and on the yearly plan $0.0208 — both our arithmetic on VidMage’s published prices. Top-up packs range from $0.02 down to $0.01 a second, with the cheapest rate available only on the $499.99 bundle.
Is it safe to upload client footage?
To the web tool, treat that as a data transfer to a third party and check it against your own policy first, whatever the vendor’s retention promise says. VidMage states that web uploads are deleted within two hours, are never used for training and travel encrypted. The Mac app is the better answer for sensitive material because it processes entirely on your device and uploads nothing.
Do I have to label a face-swapped video?
If your audience includes the EU, yes. Article 50 of the AI Act has required deployers to disclose AI-manipulated video since 2 August 2026, and the duty applies even when there is no intent to deceive. Labelling voluntarily elsewhere is cheap insurance and increasingly expected by platforms regardless of jurisdiction.
What exactly is AIxploria?
An AI tools directory that catalogues thousands of sites across more than fifty categories, with a running feed of new arrivals and a Verified Tool badge for entries it has checked exists as described. A listing there is a visibility signal, not a quality audit — and on this particular card the 4.5 rating rests on two votes, so judge the tool on its price list and your own test footage instead.
References
VidMage Video Face Swap on AIxploria
The Ultimate List of Best AI Tools — AIxploria
Free Video Face Swap Online — VidMage
VidMage Pricing: Compare Plans and Features
Transparency obligations under Article 50 of the AI Act — European Commission
Guidelines on transparency obligations for providers and deployers of certain AI systems
Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content
Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, section 138 — legislation.gov.uk
Better protection for victims thanks to new law on sexually explicit deepfakes — GOV.UK
Biometric data guidance: biometric recognition — Information Commissioner’s Office
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