Can the archive be built on your footage before you pay?

A demo on someone else's footage cannot answer you

In-house teams get pitched media tools against sample libraries. The sample is graded, named, and small. Your library is a NAS or a RAID with years of folders, camera cards that were named in a hurry, projects that relink to paths only one editor remembers, and a pile of drives that may or may not have been copied. A demo that looks fast on sample media does not tell you whether search will find your interview, whether your codecs will index, or whether the system understands the share your editors actually mount.

That is why teams ask to see the archive on their own media before they pay. The thing being bought is not a seat in a hosted library. It is a custom system, installed on hardware they control, indexing the storage they already have. The only honest proof is that system, pointed at those volumes.

What gets built first

The Free Build is the Archive Pilot. Vaultline builds the Media Nexus archive first, around the storage you already have, against your real media. Media Nexus installs on your hardware and indexes approved storage in place. It reads. It does not rename, move, or delete originals. Transcription and tagging run on hardware you control. You get frame grabs, tags, transcripts, proxies, and searchable playback for the volumes you approved, with your naming and your folders, not a sanitized sample.

You use that archive. Then you decide. The terms are $0 upfront, $4,669 if you keep it, nothing if you don't. The keep price is fixed in writing before the build. Walk away and there is no invoice. Keep it and you own the system. The Free Build application and the Build before you buy intake are that same archive, at that same keep price.

How you start

Free Build is where a team applies: who they are, where the media lives, and what the archive needs to solve. Build before you buy is the intake for that same archive. The form is on the page, and the running archive is the proof beside it. Intake asks what the archive needs: storage, people, and folders. The archive is prepared first. Payment, if you keep it, comes after.

Relay is not part of that intake. Relay is a later build Vaultline scopes for a client after the archive, and drive tracking is one of its features. Search of the NAS cannot see a shuttle that never landed. Who has the drive explains what Relay will and will not do. It informs. It does not hard-block a drive.

What this offer is not

It is not the free PDF guide at /blueprint. That guide is a document. It is not the paid Media Operations Blueprint, which is a separate audit and roadmap with its own price on its own page. Buying that Blueprint is not required before an Archive Pilot, and this page is not that checkout.

It is not a SaaS MAM that moves the library offsite so a demo can run in a browser. If you want the comparison between uploading media and indexing the storage you have, it is here. On-prem, for a team that intends to keep the files, is what self-hosted means. How search works once the index is on your NAS is searching footage without an upload.

What you provide, and what happens if you keep it

Starting the build takes four things. They are how it lands on your media instead of on a sample.

• Read access to the storage you want indexed.
• A Mac to run the pilot on, or help specifying one.
• A short fit call.
• A person who can make the keep-or-walk-away decision.

If you keep the archive, you own it. $4,669 includes the archive, configuration, install, orientation, and 90 days of free Care. Remote access is part of every Media Nexus, not a later build. The archive also includes AI tagging, search, semantic search, proxy generation, and collections. Relay is a later build Vaultline scopes for a client after the archive, and drive tracking is one of its features. Full drive census, verified backup, and automation are later builds. You pay $4,669 in the portal, then you sign up for Care, and only then does the install become visible. The 90 free days are that Care signup. What you own after that is described in what you own after the archive is built. Care is $600 per month and Partner is $1,800 per month, both on the Care page, and neither is required after those 90 days. The figures for this build are $0 upfront, $4,669 if you keep it, and nothing if you walk away.