How to use CSuite.

CSuite is a native desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux. It runs entirely on your computer. There is no website to log into, no account to create, and nothing to install in your browser.

CSuite has a single window with three main areas:

• The menu: the strip of icons down the left side. The CSuite mark at the top opens the Dashboard (recent files and quick actions); below it sit the four modalities (text, image, audio, video), then Chat and Workflows, and finally Models and Account. Hover an icon to see its label.
• The sidebar: the list of files in your current modality. For example, in the Image workspace it shows every image in your project folder with a small thumbnail and filename.
• The main panel: where you preview, edit and generate content. A model picker sits above the preview and a prompt sits below it, so you can iterate without leaving the workspace.

Each workspace is built around the same idea: pick a model on the right, type a prompt, and the result lands in your project folder and shows up in the sidebar.

The project folder is the heart of CSuite. Everything you generate or edit is saved there as a real file you can open in Finder, File Explorer, or any other app.

• The app starts with a sensible default folder, so there’s nothing to configure up front. A folder pill above the sidebar shows which folder you’re in; click it to switch.
• Each workspace shows the files it can open: the Image workspace lists the images in the folder, the Audio workspace the audio files, and so on.
• You can drop existing files into the folder from outside the app; click the refresh button next to the folder pill to pick them up.
• Switching to a different folder gives you a clean workspace, great for keeping client projects separate.
• Use the ⋯ menu on any file in the sidebar to reveal it in your operating system’s file manager, duplicate it, or delete it.
• Select a file and press Delete or Backspace to remove it. The app shows a confirm dialog first so you can’t lose work by accident.

An AI model is the engine that does the actual generating. CSuite lets you choose from two kinds of providers:

Cloud providers

CSuite connects to two cloud platforms (Replicate and Runware) that run powerful models on their own servers. Through them you reach models from OpenAI, Google, Black Forest Labs, ByteDance, Meta and more, with a single key per platform. CSuite talks to them directly using your own API key. Your prompts never pass through us.

Local providers

Local providers run open-weight models directly on your computer. Once a model is downloaded you can use it offline, with no per-request cost, and nothing leaves your machine. CSuite supports two runtimes:

• Ollama: the easiest way to run text models like Gemma, Llama, Mistral and Qwen. CSuite can either bundle Ollama for you or use an existing Ollama install you already have.
• Hugging Face runtime: runs ONNX-exported open models. CSuite installs the runtime for you on first use.

How well a local model performs depends on your computer’s memory and (on Macs) your Apple silicon chip. For Ollama models, CSuite compares each model’s needs against your machine and blocks the download if it needs more RAM than you have.

Click the Models icon in the menu to see every model available to you, grouped by provider. From here you can:

• Browse the catalog of local models that you can download. Each row shows the model size, what it’s good at, and whether your computer can run it.
• Download a local model: click Download and watch the progress bar. You can keep using the rest of the app while it downloads.
• See which models are already installed and how much disk space they’re using.
• Hide models you don’t want cluttering up the picker when you’re generating content.
• Delete models you no longer need to free up disk space.

The text workspace is a rich-text editor for drafting, rewriting and brainstorming with AI assistance. It opens plain text, Markdown and HTML files.

Generating text

Inline editing tools

Select any piece of text and a small toolbar appears with quick AI actions:

• Shorten: tighten the selection.
• Expand: flesh the selection out with more detail.
• Improve: rewrite the selection for better clarity.
• Generate image: in Markdown and HTML documents, turn the selected text into an image that’s inserted right after it.

Inline images and ghost suggestions

You can ask the model to generate an image right inside a document. It appears inline and is saved alongside the text. When you pause typing for a few seconds, the editor can also suggest a few words ahead in faint grey; press Tab to accept, Esc to dismiss, or use the small Accept / Try again / Cancel controls that appear by the caret.

The image workspace is built around a thumbnail grid sidebar and a large preview panel.

Generating an image

Editing images

A toolbar above the preview holds the editing tools. Each edit overwrites the file in place, or, with Save a new copy ticked, keeps the original and writes a new file alongside it.

• Resize: pick a preset size (240p up to 1080p) or set a custom width and height with an optional aspect-ratio lock. CSuite uses high-quality resampling under the hood.
• Crop: drag a rectangle in the preview, freely or to a fixed aspect ratio.
• Rotate: rotate the image in 90° steps.
• Annotate: draw directly on the image.
• Quality: adjust JPEG compression (for JPEG files).
• Format: convert between PNG, JPEG and WebP.

To re-generate from an existing image, add it as a reference image when you generate (above), or use Chat or a Workflow.

The audio workspace handles voice, music and sound effects. It opens MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG and AAC files.

What you can generate

• Voice (text-to-speech): type a script, pick a voice model, and get back natural-sounding speech.
• Music: describe a track and let a music model compose it.
• Sound effects: describe a sound (“a rusty door creaking open”) and get a short clip.

Editing audio

• Trim: cut the clip down to a specific start and end time.
• Fade: add a fade-in and/or fade-out.
• Volume: turn the clip’s gain up or down.
• Speed: speed the clip up or slow it down.
• Convert: export the clip to WAV.

The built-in player has play, pause and a scrub bar so you can preview before saving.

The video workspace handles MP4, WebM, MOV and AVI files. For stitching multiple clips, audio tracks and titles into a single longer video, see Custom video.

Generating video

Editing video

• Crop: crop the frame freely or to a fixed aspect ratio (1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 9:16 and more).
• Resize: choose a fixed height (240, 360, 480, 720, or 1080) and the width is calculated automatically.
• Transcode: convert the container between MP4, WebM and MOV.

Custom video is a separate creation mode for stitching multiple clips, images, audio tracks and titles into a single longer video. Where the regular video workspace produces one short clip at a time, custom video gives you a multi-track timeline and renders the whole composition out to a single MP4 (or WebM, or MOV).

Starting a composition

Drafting with AI

The fastest way to start is to describe what you want. CSuite drafts a script, scenes and titles for you, then generates the images, voice-over, music and SFX in parallel.

Editing the timeline

• Move and resize: drag a clip’s body to move it, drag its right edge to resize. Clips snap to whole-second ticks and to the start and end of every other clip.
• Inspector panel: click any clip to edit its properties: start, duration, fade in/out, plus per-kind controls (font and text for titles, fit for images, muted for video, volume for audio).
• Add clips: use the + Text / Image / Video / Audio palette to insert a new clip. The image, video and audio buttons open a picker listing files from your project folder.
• Delete: select a clip and press backspace.
• AI follow-up edits: go back to the AI prompt sidebar and ask for a change (“make the music quieter, add a logo at 3 seconds”) and CSuite produces a full timeline replacement that preserves your other clips.

Visual coherence

When the AI bootstraps a composition, it also picks a short visual theme (palette, lighting, mood) that gets appended to every image-generation prompt. The result is a sequence that feels like one shoot rather than a collage of unrelated frames. You don’t need to manage this yourself; it lives in the composition file and travels with the project.

Rendering to a file

When the timeline looks right, click Download to open the export settings.

• Resolution: Native, 480p, 720p, 1080p or 2160p. Aspect ratio is preserved.
• Framerate: Native, 24, 30 or 60 fps.
• Format: MP4 (H.264), WebM (VP9), or MOV (H.264).

The rendered file lands in your project folder as a regular video file alongside any single-clip generations, ready to play, edit further or share.

Chat is a single conversational workspace where you can talk to a model and produce media in the same thread. Click the chat icon in the menu to open it.

Setting up a chat

What the chat can do

• Stream replies from the chat model.
• Generate a new image, sound or video on request: “make me a hero image of a coastline at sunset”.
• Edit the most recent media inline: “crop this to 16:9”, “trim the first two seconds”, “convert to WebM”.
• Take a previous image as a starting point and produce a variant from it.
• Use earlier images as the start and end frames of a new video.

A workflow is a visual diagram that chains models and edits together. Think of it as a recipe you can run again and again, great for repeatable jobs like “turn a blog post into a voiced video with subtitles”.

The node types

• Input: your starting point. A typed prompt, an image, an audio clip or a video.
• Model: runs an AI model. Connect inputs to the “prompt”, “instructions” or media handles, and the node generates an output.
• Edit: a deterministic transformation: resize, crop, trim, convert, transcode.
• Combine: merges several files into one. Use it to play tracks together, or to glue clips end-to-end.
• File: saves the final result into your project folder.
• Note: a free-form sticky-note for labelling sections of the canvas. Notes have no inputs or outputs and never block a run.

Building a workflow

The Account screen has five sections: Analytics, License, Updates, Feedback and Reset. Provider keys are managed under Models, not here.

Analytics

• See total spend, request count, and token usage across the last 7, 30, 90 days, or all time.
• Break it down by provider, model, and modality so you can spot which workflow is eating your budget.
• Local-provider rows show $0.00. They’re free to run, and they’re tracked alongside cloud usage so you can compare apples to apples.

License

• Activate a license: paste your key and click activate. The app validates the key online once, then stores a signed receipt that works offline.
• See your license status: active, in its offline grace window, expired, or moved to another machine, along with when it was last validated. The app re-checks periodically in the background.
• Deactivate a machine: frees up the seat so you can use the license on a different computer.

Updates

• CSuite keeps itself up to date: it checks for new versions in the background, downloads them quietly, and installs on the next restart. When an update is ready, a Restart to update button appears here, and a small indicator shows in the side menu while one downloads.
• Prefer to stay in control? Untick Automatically download and install updates and use Check for updates whenever it suits you.
• If updating fails repeatedly, the app points you to the website to download the latest version manually.

Feedback

Send bug reports and feature requests straight from the app and track their status over time. Each one can come back with comments as we follow up. Sending feedback requires an activated license.

Reset

Reset returns the app to a fresh state: it clears your local app configuration and relaunches so you can set it up again. Your generated content stays put; anything in your project folder is left untouched.

CSuite is local-first. Here’s exactly where your data goes:

• Your files live in the project folder you picked. They are never uploaded anywhere by CSuite.
• Your prompts go directly to whichever provider you picked for that generation. Local providers stay on your machine; cloud providers receive the prompt through your own API key.
• Your provider keys are stored locally on your computer, encrypted at rest with your operating system’s secure storage (Keychain on macOS, DPAPI on Windows, libsecret on Linux), never on our servers.
• Your license is verified online when you first activate it; after that the app uses a signed receipt that works offline.
• What the app tells our servers: license checks and feedback send only what’s needed to do the job (your license key, app version, platform and a machine identifier), and update checks just fetch the release feed. Nothing else.
• What we never see: your prompts, your generations, your project files, your API keys, or which models you use.

A generation failed

• Check the model picker. Is the right provider selected?
• Open Models, click the provider, and press Save key again to re-validate. Expired or invalid keys are the most common cause.
• Some cloud providers throttle accounts that run out of credit. Check your usage and balance on the provider’s dashboard.

A local model is stuck or slow

• Bigger models need more memory. If your machine has limited RAM, try a smaller model from the catalog.
• Restart the app. Local runtimes free up memory on quit.
• In the Models screen, try deleting and re-pulling the model if a download was interrupted.

A video edit was canceled or didn’t finish

• Quitting the app while a video edit is running cancels the job. Re-run it once the app is back open.
• Very large source files take time. The progress bar shows how far along the edit is.

Still stuck? See Support below for how to get in touch.

CSuite is built and supported by a small team. Every email goes to a real person, and we read every one.

• Email support@csuite.so for bugs, questions, license help, and feature requests.
• Include your operating system, a short description of what you were doing, and (if relevant) the provider and model you had selected. The more we know up front, the faster we can help.
• Lost your license key? Email us from the address you used to purchase and we’ll resend it.
• Have an idea? We genuinely want to hear it. The same inbox is the right place.

CSuite is a one-time purchase, sold with a no-questions-asked refund window. We’d rather you spend money on something you love than feel stuck with something you don’t.

• 7-day refund: if CSuite isn’t the right fit for any reason, email us within 7 days of purchase and we’ll refund your order in full.
• No forms, no surveys: a one-line message is enough. We don’t require a reason, though we’re always grateful when people share one so we can improve the app.
• How it works: refunds are issued to the original payment method via Stripe (typically 5 to 10 business days to land back on your statement). Your license key is deactivated as part of the refund.

To request a refund, email support@csuite.so with the email address you used at checkout.