The child never sees it
A twelve-year-old is told they lift their head. They can’t feel it, so they don’t believe it, so it doesn’t change. Many have never once watched themselves bat.
For NGOs & community cricket programmes
One coach’s phone, and a way to have seen every child.
CricCuts turns a single phone into a highlight reel for every child, a way for young coaches to look again, and something real to show a funder — with the AI running on the phone, even at a ground with no signal. Free for community programmes. Not a trial.
- Works with no signal
- Children’s footage stays on the phone
- No cost per reel
The problem
Three things a session loses the moment it ends.
A phone propped against a kit bag already sees all three. What has been missing is anything that turns two hours of footage into something a child and a coach can use — without a laptop, an editor or a data connection.
One coach, forty children
A coach can watch one net at a time. Whatever happened in the others is gone — and the child who needed the correction most is often the one nobody was watching.
Attendance isn’t evidence
Sessions run, children enrolled, attendance held. All true, all outputs — and none of it shows a funder one child actually getting better at anything.
Coach hours are the real limit on how many children a programme can serve well. Everything below is about stretching them without hiring.
How it works today
Prop a phone. Run the session. Share the reels.
One phone, no setup
Lean it on a bag where it can see the batter. If it gets knocked or re-aimed between overs, the app notices and re-frames itself. No tripod, no second person filming.
The phone finds the cricket
The app listens for bat on ball and cuts each moment tight around the shot — in a noisy ground, with shots flying in the next net.
A reel for every child
The coach names who batted, keeps or drops any shot, and exports — ready for the child, a parent or the programme’s own records. Nothing is decided for you.
Why it can be free
Built for a ground with no Wi-Fi and no budget.
One mid-range Android
Per centre. No camera rig, no laptop, no editing suite, no IT person.
No connection needed
The AI runs on the phone. A ground with no signal analyses as fast as one with fibre.
Nobody’s data pack
Two hours of video is never uploaded, so no coach or parent pays for the megabytes.
Zero cost per reel
No server does the work, so the thousandth reel costs exactly what the first one did.
This is the whole reason we can give it to you for nothing. Cloud video tools charge per clip because each one costs them real computing. Moving the AI onto the phone removes the bill, not just the price.
A connection is used only for an optional one-time speech-model download and the city search at sign-up.
Safeguarding
A child’s footage never has to leave the phone.
Cloud video tools work by uploading footage to a server so a model can look at it. For video of children, that single design choice creates the consent problem, the storage problem, the breach exposure and most of the compliance burden.
CricCuts does the analysis on the phone that filmed it. There is no cloud copy of a child’s session to safeguard, because one is never made. A reel goes where the coach sends it, and nowhere else.
Under India’s DPDP Act, 2023
A child is anyone under 18. Processing a child’s personal data needs verifiable parental consent, and behavioural tracking, profiling and targeted advertising aimed at children are prohibited outright. A programme whose footage never leaves the device starts that conversation from a very different place.
A summary of the law, not legal advice. Your own counsel should confirm how the Act applies to your programme.
It is the honest answer to the question a parent, a programme lead and a funder’s compliance team all ask. In a pilot, consent is agreed with your safeguarding lead before a single child is filmed.
What it does for your coaches
Forty children, and a way to have seen all of them.
Many community coaches are mentors from the same neighbourhoods, early in their own coaching careers. This gives them what a senior coach has and they don’t yet: the chance to look again.
No scrubbing through raw video
Each child’s session arrives as a short row of real deliveries, already cut tight around the shot. Tap one, watch it, move on.
What a coach can now catch on the replay: the head falling away at contact, the bat coming down across the line, the front foot planted too early, the same dismissal week after week.
A prompt to look — never a score on a child
Each shot is marked still, some movement or moving at the head: a nudge for the coach to take a closer look.
The app never shows a number on a child, in the app or on a video. A programme working with vulnerable children should recoil from anything that ranks them — so it doesn’t.
Picture a child who has been told for years what they are not good at. A reel of their own best shots may be the first evidence they have ever held that they are good at something — and watching yourself succeed is itself a powerful way to learn a movement.
The research behind it, in plain English: the neuroscience of learning from watching yourself.
Life skills, made visible
A reel is a teaching object, not a souvenir.
The skills a sport-for-development programme sets out to build, with something concrete to point at.
| The skill you build | What the footage lets a coach do with it |
|---|---|
| Communication | Play back the over and ask who called, who backed up, and who said nothing. |
| Collaboration | A child sees their own part in someone else’s wicket, not only their own runs. |
| Critical thinking | “You were out the same way three times this month” becomes a visible pattern, not an accusation. |
| Creativity | The child picks the shots, the effects and the order — they author how their week is told. |
| Resilience | Watch the dismissal, then watch the same shot played well the following week. |
| Leadership | Older children review the juniors’ reels — a real job for the mentors you already have. |
And for the rainy days, the app carries a cricket classroom too: a physics lab, all 42 Laws, a DLS calculator and lessons drawn from real cricket moments. See what’s in it.
The offer
Free for community programmes. Not a trial.
What your programme gets
- A reel for every child, every week, from one phone
- Young coaches given the chance to look again
- Something real to show a funder, not just attendance
- Children’s footage that never leaves the device
- The whole app, on as many coaches’ phones as you run
- It works at a ground with no signal at all
Why we can
A reel costs us nothing to make. There is no server bill to recover from you, so there is no invoice to send — this month or any month after.
The free offer is the app as it stands today. We won’t promise you features to win you over.
What we ask
Honest feedback, and — only where consent allows and you are happy with it — permission to show what your programme produced.
When a sponsor is already paying
If a sponsor already funds your programme and wants their brand on the reels your children choose to share, that is agreed with the sponsor, under strict rules. It is never charged to you — it is a line in the sponsor’s budget, and we will say so to them directly.
A sponsor can even commission a backdrop scene of their own that every child in the programme plays inside. What sponsors can do.
The rules that stand regardless
- No advertising targeted at children, and no profiling of them
- No alcohol, tobacco, pan masala or gaming brands
- Never a logo across a child’s face, and no scene that covers the player
Straight with you
What works today, and what doesn’t exist yet.
We would rather you saw the right-hand column now than discovered it in month three.
Working today
- Finding the shots and building a reel, on the phone
- Trimming, effects, slow motion and animated backdrop scenes
- Reframing for vertical video and for YouTube
- The Science Lab, tips, Laws, glossary, DLS and life lessons
- Sessions named per child, and searchable
- Head-stillness prompts on every shot
Not built yet
- Your crest in place of ours — being built now for our first partners
- Anything that syncs between two coaches’ phones
- A programme dashboard, a consent register, or reels that open as a web link
- An archive that survives a lost phone, or a report pack for a funder
- An iPhone version — CricCuts is Android only today
If a pilot shows some of these would change how your programme works, that becomes a conversation about building them together. One thing wouldn’t change: the analysis stays on the phone.
How we start
One centre. One term. No contract.
Weeks 1–2
Set up
Pick one centre or one squad. Two coaches’ phones set up. Consent agreed with your safeguarding lead before a single child is filmed.
Weeks 3–10
Film every session
A reel per child, every week. Your coaches tell us what’s wrong with it, and we fix it while they watch.
Weeks 11–12
Look at what happened
Coach time, children reached, what the children said, what parents said — and what you can now show.
Then
You keep it
If it earned its place, carry on — still free. If it didn’t, tell us why. There is no upsell waiting at week twelve.
We take very few partners at a time, so each one gets proper attention.
Questions programmes ask
The quick answers.
Is it really free?
Yes — the whole app as it stands, on as many coaches’ phones as you run, with no end date. It isn’t a trial. The analysis runs on the phone, so a reel costs us nothing to make and there is nothing to bill you for. Money only enters the picture when a sponsor who already funds you wants their brand on the reels, and that is charged to the sponsor, never to the programme.
Our grounds have no signal. Will it work?
Yes. Finding the shots, editing and exporting all run offline on the phone. A connection is only used for an optional one-time speech-model download and the city search at sign-up — both can happen anywhere with Wi-Fi.
Is any child’s footage uploaded?
No. The reel is built on the phone that filmed the session and nothing is sent to our servers. A finished reel goes only where the coach chooses to send it.
What phones do our coaches need?
An Android phone running Android 8.0 or newer — a mid-range one is enough. There is no iPhone version yet.
Can it give us a report for our funder?
Not as a finished report today — dashboards and report packs need servers, and we haven’t built them. What you will have is a reel per child per week and, at the end of a pilot, a joint look at coach time, children reached and what children and parents said.
Does the app score or rank children?
No. The app never shows a number on a child. Each shot carries a simple head-stillness prompt — still, some movement, or moving — as a nudge for the coach to look.
Who is behind CricCuts?
CricCuts is built in Bengaluru by Gokul Sundar, an engineer and lifelong cricketer, as a small independent company whose mission is technology that reaches the people the cloud prices out. Read the story and the mission.
Register interest
Tell us about your programme.
No commitment and nothing to sign. It just tells us you’d like to talk.
- We reply by email and find a time that suits you.
- We show it working — sixty seconds of someone batting, analysed on a phone in front of you.
- You pick a centre and a start date, and we set up two coaches’ phones together.
Prefer email? Write to support@criccuts.com.
Register your programme’s interest
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