Uplifted vs Shade

"If you can afford it… magic" — for the download problem.

"If you can afford it, shade.inc or lucidlink.com are magic. Rather than downloading that 4K file entirely before you start, it will download chunks as you need them while editing." — Hacker News commenter, public thread

That's the job Shade is for: getting heavy files into an edit without the wait. Notice what the sentence is about — file transfer. Nothing in it is about what marketing teams actually lose sleep over: which creative worked, why, and what to make next. Uplifted is built for that half of the problem — and the library, tagging, and search come with it.

"Once we really started to use it, things started to go downhill."

"During the trial days, everything was going super smoothly. Once we really started to use it, things started to go downhill… the app (on MacOS at least) seems to be pretty f'ed and they still have quite some bugs to work out. It's a shame, I was liking the whole offering." — post-production user, Logik Forums (forum.logik.tv), after four days of production use; the same user switched to LucidLink

Early products have early edges — Shade launched publicly in 2025 and is iterating fast. But your creative library is the system your whole team stands on. Uplifted is in production with enterprise marketing teams daily, and switching is white-glove: your library arrives organized, not re-tagged by hand.

"Media storage that just works better." Their words, their scope.

Shade's homepage headline calls it what it is: media storage — "intelligent file streaming, review and approval, automated metadata, AI search… for media teams." Its use cases are the edit world: post-production, sports media, film & TV, live events, houses of worship. Storage that streams is the product; everything orbits the edit bay.

For a marketing team, storage is where the job starts, not where it ends. Uplifted takes the same library and closes the loop: every asset tied to the ads it became, the results those ads drove, and the brief for what comes next.

Search by face and jersey number — but never by ROAS.

Shade's AI search page is specific about what its AI finds: scenes, transcripts, faces, jersey numbers, products. It's a genuine indexing engine — and not one word of it, anywhere on the site, touches an ad account. No Meta integration, no Google, no performance data of any kind. Shade can find "the wide shot of the CEO outside"; it cannot tell you whether that shot ever converted.

Uplifted searches your library the same way — and then answers the question behind the search: which hook held attention, which scene drove ROAS, which creative earns the next brief. The search is parity; the answer is not.

Automations that move files. Not an agent that knows your brand.

Shade's newest feature, Custom Objects & Automations, is a no-code builder: when a file lands, route it, proxy it, notify someone. Useful plumbing — and its "AI Automation Builder" writes those file-moving rules from a plain-language prompt. What none of it does: reason over your creative and your results. There's no brand memory, no audience context, no performance history for the automation to draw on — the triggers are file events, not business questions.

Uplifted's agent works from your whole library, your real Meta and Google numbers, and your Context Hub — brand, audience, guidelines. Ask "what should we test next?" and it answers with your own evidence, not a routing rule.

Priced per seat, capped at 15 — then the quote begins.

Shade's pricing page is published and honest: Growth is $35 per seat per month ($29.75 on annual billing), 500GB of active storage per seat, one workspace — and a hard cap of 15 seats. Past that, it's custom Enterprise. A 10-person team is $350/month before storage add-ons; a growing team hits the cap and enters sales-call territory.

Uplifted's pricing is flat and published — $249 or $499 a month, not per person — and people you share links with need no seat at all. The bill doesn't grow because your team did.