Boom’s macOS camera app lets you customize the look of your video call

As someone who talks to many people outside my time zone, I usually spend at least a few minutes explaining my location, time, and weather conditions on a video call. This information just got easier to convey with the Mac app Explosionis now also available as a freemium product.

Boom is a bootstrapped company founded by former Shopify employees Robleh Jama and Krishna Satya. The app works with all major video conferencing apps, including Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. Once installed, you can add customized themes to your video call appearances, including your name, title, location, time, and weather.

It also lets you react during calls with on-screen effects, stickers, and GIFs. You can also tweak your look with controls for things like brightness, contrast, saturation, shadow, tint, and exposure. There are also different presets for different looks.

Moreover, users can design an off-camera screen to show a customized design instead of a blank screen.

The company is also introducing a new feature to track meeting times

Speaking to TechCrunch, the co-founders said they started working on the idea during their remote work days at Shopify.

“We realized we weren’t just knowledge workers anymore; we were all broadcasters now. We had the hardware: nice cameras, microphones, our home offices were being used as broadcast studios. But what about the software? It was still just vanilla Zoom, Meet, and Teams. That frustration with existing tools is what fueled Boom,” they said.

Boom’s co-founders emphasized that the product aims to make video calls across different applications more fun and engaging.

The startup has been testing the product for more than a year and will make it generally available in April. The company previously only offered a paid product, but changed its pricing model to a freemium service this summer.

Users can use the virtual camera, themes, and reactions for free, but advanced camera controls, premium themes, custom branding, and screen sharing features like presenter overlay and cursor highlight magnifier will cost you $8 per month, $80 per year, or $219 for a lifetime license.

Later this month, the startup will roll out a timebox feature to limit certain discussion topics.

Boom is working on features like trend tracker, dynamic polls, and quizzes in its next release cycle.

Boom’s co-founders believe they can grow the product organically without venture capital backing.

“We are very committed to taking a more independent path and not going the VC route. Our goal is to make Boom useful enough to grow organically and profitably for 10+ years. If we can do that while remaining independent, that’s a dream,” they said.

Story updated with new pricing tiers that Boom introduced this week.