June 23, 2026
Steamed, served, and open-source
Show HN: Shumai – open-source Frame.io alternative for creative work
A new free tool for video teams drops, and the comments instantly turn into a dumpling debate
TLDR: Shumai is a new free, open-source tool aiming to help creative teams review and share videos and images without paying for bigger platforms. The early community reaction is light but memorable: one person wants to try it, and another hijacked the launch by reminding everyone Shumai is also a dumpling.
A new project called Shumai has arrived on Hacker News promising a free, open-source alternative to pricey creative-review tools like Frame.io — and while the product pitch is all about video notes, secure sharing, storage, and even built-in artificial intelligence help, the comment section quickly decided the real headline was the name. Instead of an all-out technical showdown, the earliest crowd reaction veered straight into food discourse, with one commenter gleefully pointing out that "shumai" is also a classic Cantonese dumpling, or "siomai" in the Philippines. Yes, a software launch accidentally became snack content.
That didn’t stop the good vibes. The strongest clear opinion in the thread so far is simple: people are curious and willing to give it a shot. One commenter dropped a short, cheerful "Great! I'd like to try it," which captures the mood better than a thousand buzzwords. There’s not much blood-on-the-floor drama yet, but there is a funny little clash between the product’s serious ambitions — helping creative teams review videos frame by frame and organize giant media libraries — and the community’s immediate instinct to turn it into a dumpling joke. In classic internet fashion, the app may want to disrupt creative workflow, but the commenters are busy asking whether it’s software, lunch, or somehow both. Honestly, that may be the most relatable product launch energy imaginable.
Key Points
- •Shumai is presented as an open-source platform for creative work with storage, review, sharing, access control, transcoding, and metadata features.
- •The platform supports local filesystems and S3-compatible storage services including AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, and MinIO.
- •Shumai Agent adds AI capabilities such as workspace chat, custom tools, sandboxed script execution, metadata autofill using Google Gemini, and semantic search using vector embeddings.
- •The article provides a Docker Compose quickstart that lets users run Shumai without manually cloning the repository or installing packages.
- •An alternative installation path is available through NPM, requiring PostgreSQL with pgvector and additional system dependencies such as ffmpeg, bubblewrap, and socat.