The honest page

What Hailo does.
And what it doesn't.

Every software site tells you what its product can do. This one tells you where it stops, in the same amount of detail.

If Hailo is wrong for the way you shoot, we would rather you found that out on this page than three weddings in.

Updated September 6, 2026
Works

Shipping today, in the app you can download right now.

Partly

Real, with an edge on it you should know about before you lean on it.

Dated

Built, not out yet. The date is a commitment, not a hope.

Not built

No code and no date. Listed so you do not discover it later.

The whole ledger

Three wings. Manage and Deliver are deep and finished. Edit is the ambitious one, and it is where the sharp edges are, so read that section slowly.

Manage
Your front office, from the first inquiry to the last payment. This wing is finished.
Works

Inquiry form and lead pipeline

A public inquiry form you build and embed on your own site. Every inquiry lands as a lead with its own email thread, tags, notes and a stage you drag it through.

Works

Proposals the couple reads and signs

A package catalog with add-ons, several layouts, and presets you reuse. The couple picks their package and signs on the same page.

Works

Contracts and e-signing

Your templates, filled from the project record, signed in the browser with an audit record kept behind the signature.

Works

Invoices, retainers and payment plans

Card payments through your own Stripe or Square account, split payments on a schedule, and automatic reminders on what is unpaid. Hailo takes no cut of what your couples pay you.

Works

Email from your own address

One-click Gmail, or any mailbox that issues an app password: Outlook, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, iCloud, or your own domain. Replies come back inside Hailo, on the lead they belong to.

Works

Automations that stop when a human replies

Sequences that fire off a booking, a date or a tag, with conditions on who gets them. When the couple writes back, the sequence halts instead of talking over them.

Works

Calendar, questionnaires and shot lists

Google or Apple calendar, written to when a contract is signed. Questionnaires and shot lists go out to the couple and come back attached to the project.

Works

Moving in from another CRM

Ready-made column maps for Pixieset Studio Manager, Studio Ninja, Dubsado, Bloom and Aisle Planner. HoneyBook, Tave, HubSpot, 17hats, Pixifi, Iris Works, Sprout Studio and ShootQ import through a mapping step you confirm. Every number in the preview comes from your rows, never from a guess.

Works

Goals, revenue and reports

Booked, collected and outstanding by month, against a goal you set. CSV out for your accountant.

Works

Billing from four countries

The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Your couples are charged in your own money, into your own Stripe or Square account, and the forms they fill in ask for a postcode in Britain and a province in Canada rather than a ZIP.

Partly

Outside the US, the wording is still American

The money is right, the words around it are not everywhere yet. The tax report is headed Sales tax rather than VAT or GST, and dates read Sep 07, 2026 instead of 7 Sep 2026. Nothing miscalculates. If it gets in your way, tell us and it moves up.

Not built

Team seats and roles

One login per studio. There is no second-shooter account, no editor account and no permissions. Every plan is a single seat today, and multi-seat pricing has no date on it yet.

Not built

QuickBooks and Zapier

Both sit on the Integrations page carrying a Coming soon chip and no button, so you can see they are planned. Nothing on them works. Export CSV from Finance for your books in the meantime.

Deliver
The page your couple watches the film on. This wing is finished, and it is the densest of the three.
Works

Client galleries you design

A cover, an entry splash with music under it, sections you arrange yourself, seven looks to start from, and your own brand colors through all of it.

Works

4K delivery

Upload a 4K export and the couple streams and downloads it in 4K. What they watch is what you delivered, not a squashed copy of it.

Works

Your own domain

Galleries served from your URL instead of ours, with your own link ending. They also embed on your existing site.

Works

Passwords, expiry and downloads

Set per gallery: a password, a date it closes, and whether the couple can download the film or only stream it.

Works

Upsells with checkout on the page

Raw footage, an extra edit, an album. The couple buys it on the gallery, on the day they are most likely to say yes.

Works

Vendor credits

Every vendor from the day credited and linked on the page the couple shares, which is the page those vendors then see.

Works

Analytics and lifecycle emails

Who opened the gallery, what they watched, what they downloaded. Delivery, reminder, review request and anniversary emails go out on their own.

Partly

Storage is a monthly allowance, not a vault

Your plan includes an amount of new film upload each month, and it resets each month rather than filling up forever. A published gallery stays live for a year and then closes. Hailo is not an archive, and it should not be your only copy. See the allowance on each plan.

Edit
The footage side. The most useful wing on a good day, and the one with the real limits.
Works

Offloading cards

Every card and reader at once, verified file by file as it lands, with a report written next to the footage. Cards are opened read-only: Hailo never changes, renames or deletes anything on a card, and never overwrites a file already on the destination.

Works

Trimming the shaky and the soft

It keeps the steady, sharp windows of each clip and drops the shake, the focus hunting, the focus pops and the zooms. Three strictness settings, from keep more to cut more. A deliberate gimbal move is not judged against a locked-off wide. Nothing is deleted, your originals are untouched, and trimming costs nothing.

Works

Every clip labeled by moment

Prep, first look, ceremony, portraits, reception, speeches, dancing, details, establishing. Split them further if you want them: bride prep and groom prep, family and bridal party and couple portraits, formal dances and open floor. Every label is correctable, and the export follows your correction.

Works

Multicam sync

Point it at one folder holding every camera. It comes back with a single timeline, one track per camera, in sync. Three cameras or seven.

Works

External recorders placed against the cameras

Your recorders and lavs land where they belong on the timeline. Broadcast timecode is used where the recorder wrote it, and waveform correlation where it did not.

Works

Ceremony and speeches films

A cut ceremony and a cut speeches sequence, multicam, built from every angle you shot, opened in your editor for you to finish.

Works

Opens in Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve

Not one export you then repair three ways. Each editor gets a file built for that editor, and every build is checked against all three before it ships.

Works

Multi-day weddings

Name each day yourself. The wedding day runs the full arc. Every other day is labeled by what is actually in the shot: couple, guests, candid, dining, activity, speeches, details, establishing.

Oct 14

Blueprints

A finished film with the footage taken out. The cuts, the song and the pacing stay, and Hailo refills every cut from a wedding you have already analyzed. You get an assembled film with a timeline you can scrub and argue with. In testing now, out on October 14, 2026.

Partly

The moment labels read one shape of wedding day

Traditional Western weddings and elopements, yes. Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Jewish and other cultural weddings, not yet. This is the biggest limit in Hailo and it gets its own section below.

Partly

Cut to a Song

Give it a wedding you have analyzed and a track, and it hands back a few short edits cut to that track, with every cut movable. It is early access and it is not switched on in every account yet.

Partly

Labeling needs the internet, and it costs

Trimming and syncing are free and run entirely on your Mac. Labeling every clip runs against your plan's included hours and needs a connection: Hailo sends a handful of small stills from each clip, and on some runs a low-resolution copy of a clip, to its analysis service. Your original camera files never leave your machine, and none of it trains a model.

Not built

Stabilization

Hailo finds the steady parts of a shaky clip. It does not make a shaky clip steady. That is still a warp stabilizer in your editor.

Not built

Color, sound mix, render

Hailo hands your editor an organized timeline and stops. It does not grade, it does not mix, it does not export your film, and it does not decide which moments make the cut. That work is the work, and it stays yours.

Not built

Stills and RAW culling

Nothing in Edit touches photos. A photographer can run their whole front office and their delivery pages in Hailo today, and get nothing at all from the footage wing.

Not built

Windows, Linux, iPhone and iPad

Hailo is a Mac app, macOS 12 or later, and the footage pipeline is built on Mac frameworks. Manage and Deliver also open in any browser at app.hailo.studio, so you can send an invoice or check a gallery from a phone. Edit needs the Mac and the drive plugged into it. Windows is long-term and not close. Linux is not planned.

Which weddings Hailo actually reads

Hailo's moment labels were built from one shape of day: getting ready, a first look, a ceremony, portraits, cocktail hour, speeches, a first dance, an open floor. If your weddings run that shape, Hailo reads them well. Elopements too, which are the same arc with fewer people in it.

Where the labels stop

A Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Jewish or any other cultural wedding does not run that shape, and Hailo does not have the vocabulary for it. There is no mehndi, no sangeet, no haldi, no baraat, no pheras, no tea ceremony, no chuppah, no nikah. Those clips come back as ceremony, reception or miscellaneous.

That is not a small miss, and calling it an edge case we are improving on would be a lie. Today, Hailo names the moments of one kind of wedding day.

What still works on any wedding

The rest of Edit does not care what tradition the day belongs to. Trimming reads picture. Multicam sync reads timecode and audio. Recorder placement reads waveforms. The exports read your timeline.

So a three-day Hindu wedding still offloads, still trims, still syncs every camera and recorder, and still opens correctly in Premiere, Final Cut or Resolve. It is the naming of the moments that is Western-shaped, and only that.

A workaround that genuinely helps

Multi-day lets you name each day whatever it is: mehndi, sangeet, haldi, tea ceremony. Days other than the wedding day are labeled by what is in the shot rather than by a Western arc, so you get couple, guests, candid, dining, activity, speeches and details. For a mehndi or a sangeet that fits far better than the wedding vocabulary would.

We want to fix this with you

If you shoot these weddings, we want to hear from you before we write a single label. Building a vocabulary for a day we have never worked, from the outside, is how you end up with something insulting instead of something useful.

Tell us how your day runs, and it goes straight into what gets built.

What is coming, and what we won't date

One thing has a date because it is built and being tuned. Everything under it is real intent with no date attached, and we are not going to invent one to make this page look better.

October 14, 2026

Blueprints

Start from a finished film's cuts, song and pacing, and refill every cut from a wedding you have already analyzed.

No date

Moment labels for cultural weddings

The limit above. It needs filmmakers who shoot these days working on it with us, which is why it has no date rather than a soft one.

No date

Team seats and roles

A second shooter, an editor and an assistant on their own logins, with permissions between them.

No date

QuickBooks and Zapier

Books without CSV work, and outgoing webhooks for new leads and payments.

No date

A version for photographers

RAW culling and stills deliveries. Being scoped, not committed to.

Long term

Windows

Real work, on Mac-native frameworks, and not close. Linux is not planned at all.

If your day doesn't fit, say so

The fastest way to change this page is to tell us what it is missing. Requests from working filmmakers are what set the order things get built in.