As someone who talks to many people outside my time zone, I often spend at least a few minutes on a video call explaining my location, time, and weather. That information became easier to convey with a Mac app called Boom, now available as a freemium product.

Boom is a bootstrapped company built 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, designation, location, time, and weather.

Plus, it lets you react through on-screen effects, stickers, and GIFs during calls. You can tweak your appearance, too, with controls for things like brightness, contrast, saturation, shadow, hue, and exposure. There are different presets for various appearances, as well.

What’s more, users can design an off-camera screen to show a customized design rather than a blank screen.

The company is also now rolling out a new feature to track meeting times

The co-founders told TechCrunch that they started working on the idea during remote work days at Shopify.

“We realized we weren’t just knowledge workers anymore—we were all streamers now. We had the hardware: nice cameras, mics, our home offices doubling as broadcast studios. But the software? Still just vanilla Zoom, Meet, and Teams. That frustration with the existing tools is what sparked Boom,” they said.

Boom co-founders emphasized that the product is to make video calls more fun and engaging across different apps.

The startup has been testing the product for over a year, with the public release in April. The company previously offered a paid-only product, but this summer it has tweaked its pricing model to become a freemium service.

Users can use the virtual camera, themes, and reactions for free. However, advanced camera controls premium themes, custom branding, and screen share features like presenter overlay and cursor highlights magnifier will cost you $7 per month, $70 per year, or $199 for a lifetime license.

Later this month, the startup will launch a timeboxing feature to limit specific discussion topics.

For the next release cycle, Boom is working on features like an agenda tracker, dynamic polls, and quizzes.

Boom co-founders think they can grow the product organically without venture backing.

“We’re pretty set on taking a more independent path and not going the VC route. Our goal is to make Boom so useful that it grows organically and profitably for 10+ years. If we can do that while staying indie, that’s the dream,” they said.