System requirements

Phoenix Clips is deliberately bring-your-own: your infrastructure, your storage, your platform accounts. That keeps your content and credentials under your control — and it means a short list of things to have ready before you start. Everything on this page is billed by its own provider (or free); none of it is part of the €9/month panel subscription, and Phoenix has no part in those bills.

The plugin

• Unreal Engine 5.6, 5.7 or 5.8, launcher builds included — no source build of the engine is required.
• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Recording uses the GPU encoder; any card that runs your game comfortably records with it.
• Nothing else to install. ffmpeg ships inside the plugin and travels into packaged builds.

The panel and your browser

The panel at phoenixtools.dev/clips is a hosted console: it runs in your browser and talks to your service instance directly. Which browsers work depends on where that instance lives:

• Self-hosted cloud instance (recommended): any modern browser. The connection is plain https and nothing platform-specific is involved.
• Local instance on your gaming PC: the panel is an https page calling http://127.0.0.1 — a combination browsers treat specially:
  • Chrome, Edge, Firefox — supported. Chrome and Edge perform a private-network preflight, which the service answers.
  • Safari — not supported. Safari blocks requests from https pages to http://127.0.0.1 entirely; there is no setting to allow it. Use the cloud mode, or a different browser.

Browser policies in this area tighten over time; we re-verify this list before each release, and it may narrow. The cloud mode is the path with no browser caveats at all.

Self-hosted cloud mode

Your own instance of the publishing service, running around the clock so scheduling and metrics don’t depend on your PC being on:

• Hosting able to run a Docker image, with a Postgres database. Railway is the documented one-click path (typically ~$5/month); Fly, a VPS or anything else that runs Docker works the same. The database schema applies itself on first start.
• S3-compatible storage for your rendered clips — Cloudflare R2 is the documented path. The bucket needs a public URL: publishing bridges (like Buffer) download your video from it, so private-only buckets cannot publish.
• Outbound internet from the instance to the platforms’ APIs.

Local mode

The service running on the machine you play on, installed from one download:

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. The installer is per-user and needs no administrator rights.
• About 300 MB of disk for the program, plus room for the library — a finished clip is tens of megabytes and lives under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Phoenix Clips.
• Nothing to install first. The runtime and ffmpeg come inside; there is no Node, no database server and no PATH to set up. The service starts when you sign in to Windows.
• Storage is optional here. Without a bucket the library still records, encodes and plays back in the panel, and YouTube and Facebook still publish. Instagram, TikTok and X download the video by URL, so those three need the S3-compatible storage described above.
• Your PC has to be on for scheduling and metrics to run — that is the difference the cloud mode buys, and why we recommend it.
• Credentials you enter are kept in the Windows credential store (DPAPI), under your account, never in a plain configuration file and never sent to Phoenix.

Platform accounts you bring

• YouTube: your own Google Cloud project with an OAuth client. Until Google verifies your app it shows an “unverified app” screen, and the default API quota allows roughly six uploads a day.
• TikTok and X: published through your own Buffer account — their direct APIs require audits or paid tiers that don’t make sense for an indie. Buffer’s free plan covers this: 3 channels, and TikTok and X are two of them. Its one limit that matters here is 10 scheduled posts per channel at a time — publishing straight away never hits it, and a full queue says so plainly instead of failing. Paid plans (from $5/month per channel) lift that; nothing here needs them.
• Facebook and Instagram: direct publishing through your own Meta app. Meta requires an app review and business verification for publish permissions — budget real calendar time for this one.
• AI captions (optional): your own Anthropic API key, set on your instance. Skip it and the Generate button simply reports it is not configured; everything else works.

The short version

You need	Where it comes from	Typical cost
UE 5.6-5.8 project on Windows 10/11	you already have it	—
The local install (optional)	one download, ~300 MB on disk	—
A browser from the list above	free	—
Docker hosting + Postgres (cloud mode)	Railway or any host	~$5/mo
S3-compatible storage with a public URL	Cloudflare R2 or any S3	~$0–1/mo
Platform credentials	YouTube directly; TikTok/X via your Buffer	$0 — Buffer’s free plan is enough
Anthropic API key (optional)	console.anthropic.com	pay per use

If any of this surprises you, better here than after checkout — and if something on this list blocks you, write to support@phoenixtools.dev before subscribing, not after.