Clip Sweeper answers one half of the storage question: which footage is dead weight you can reclaim? Run a scan, sweep the unused media, and a finished drive hands back terabytes. But the footage you keep still has to live somewhere — and how you reach it is the other half of the problem.
If you've felt that half — paying a per-seat cloud bill to stream your own footage, or watching a NAS share crawl the moment you work from home — there's a tool worth knowing about. It's called JuiceMount, it's open source (Apache-2.0), and (full disclosure) it's built by the same editor behind Clip Sweeper.
The recurring-bill problem
The usual way to reach footage remotely is a hosted service: LucidLink, Suite, Shade, Iconik. They're genuinely good at what they do — LucidLink in particular gives you a real network volume that just works. The catch is the meter. You pay per seat and per terabyte, every month, to access storage you may already own — and the day you decide to leave, some of them charge you again to pull your own bytes back out.
That's the gap JuiceMount aims at. Its pitch is blunt: "the open-source alternative to LucidLink, Suite, Shade, and Iconik. $0 per seat, no storage contract." It doesn't replace every feature those tools have — it removes the per-seat tax on simply reaching your storage. If you want to check the math, JuiceMount keeps an honest, dated breakdown of how it compares to LucidLink, Suite, and Shade.
What JuiceMount actually is
JuiceMount turns a NAS you already own into a real Finder volume — it shows up as a drive at a stable path, so Premiere, Resolve, and Final Cut link to it by path and stay linked on every Mac. Nobody relinks when they switch machines. Under the hood it's built on the open-source JuiceFS filesystem, which stores each file as small 4 MB blocks rather than one monolithic object. That block detail is the whole trick.
Blocks, not whole files
When you open a 100 GB clip just to check one shot, a sync-style tool (Dropbox, Drive, and friends) has to move the whole 100 GB before you see a frame. JuiceMount streams only the blocks your playhead actually touches — scrub a dozen spots and you've pulled a few dozen megabytes, not the whole reel. Those figures are illustrative line-rate math, not a benchmark of any vendor, but the architecture is the point.
On the maker's own 10 GbE network the volume sustained roughly 7 Gbit/s, with an SSD cache so anything you've already touched answers locally, and filename search came off a local index in about 29 ms across ~131,000 entries. Those are author-measured numbers from one Mac-to-TrueNAS rig, published with methodology — read them as "here's what it did on my bench," not an independent benchmark. The full breakdown is in the author-measured performance numbers.
The honest flip side: that speed lives on your LAN. Working remotely, you're bound by the line your ISP sells you like everyone else — the local metadata index and cache are what keep it usable, not magic bandwidth. If you've ever wondered why a NAS share turns to molasses over a VPN even when the speed test looks fine, JuiceMount's writeup on why your NAS feels slow over a VPN explains the real culprit: it's latency and round trips, not throughput.
It keeps working when the network doesn't
You can pin a project to the local cache and keep cutting with the network off — on a plane, in a hotel, during the inevitable outage. When something isn't cached and you're offline, it fails in milliseconds with an honest error instead of beachballing Finder for thirty seconds. It is primary storage with a cache, though — not a backup. A failed disk is still your failed disk, so RAID and an offsite mirror stay your responsibility.
Your bytes stay yours
Because the on-disk format is open and documented (it's plain JuiceFS), you're never locked in: the stock juicefs client can mount the same volume with JuiceMount nowhere in the picture. Leaving costs you a LAN copy off your own NAS — $0 in egress, just wire time. That's a different deal from a hosted service, where the exit can arrive with a bill. JuiceMount's field note on what leaving your storage vendor actually costs prices that exit out honestly, including the cases where it isn't free.
JuiceMount is Mac-only (macOS 14+) and still pre-1.0: today you build the Mac app from source — there's no notarized download yet. The server stack runs on any Docker box (TrueNAS, Synology, QNAP, Unraid). It is not a media-asset manager, it has no AI or content search (filenames only), and heavy multi-editor use hasn't been soak-tested. If you need review-and-approval, AI tagging, Windows clients, or a support contract, the hosted tools are still the answer. If you own a NAS and want the access layer to be free and yours, that's its lane exactly.
Two halves of owning your media
This is where the two tools meet. Clip Sweeper decides what footage is worth keeping — it sweeps out the unused weight so you're not paying to store or move dead clips. JuiceMount decides where what's left lives and how fast you reach it — on hardware you own, at LAN speed on your own network, with no per-seat meter. Reclaim first, then own what you keep.
Both questions are really cost questions, so both have a calculator. Clip Sweeper's storage cost calculator shows what wasted space is costing you each month; JuiceMount's rent-vs-own payback calculator shows how fast a NAS pays for itself against a per-seat subscription. Run both and you'll see the whole bill clearly.
Curious how the mount itself works, or want to set it up on a box you already have? Start with how it works, then the setup guide.