Blunt, specific feedback on the two things that decide whether anyone clicks. Free right now — emailed back to you, usually within a few hours.
Send yours in ↓You spent nine hours editing and eleven minutes on the thumbnail. Then it goes out, gets shown to a few hundred people, and almost nobody clicks — and YouTube doesn't tell you whether the problem was the thumbnail, the title, or the video itself.
What your thumbnail actually communicates in the half-second it gets in a crowded feed — as opposed to what you meant it to say.
Text too small to survive a phone screen, a face that reads as neutral, no clear subject, a title that repeats what the image already said. The actual issues, not "make it pop."
Three alternative titles and a plain list of changes to make to the image, in priority order — the kind you can do in the editor you already have, before you publish.
Sample roast — a real roast of the "Never Gonna Give You Up" thumbnail, so you can see exactly what you'll get.
Subject: Rick Astley – "Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)", uploaded by Rick Astley (@RickAstleyYT), one of YouTube's largest and most recognisable channels. Chosen because it's massive, public, and immune to harm from honest commentary — not a real submission.
Split-screen layout: left third is a solid navy-to-lighter-blue panel carrying all the text, right two-thirds is the video still — Rick Astley mid-gesture at a chrome mic stand, grey suit jacket over a black-and-white striped top, singing against a soft-focus stained-glass-window background. Bottom-left corner has a white "4K" badge on the same navy panel. At feed size the eye lands on the big white "RICK ASTLEY" wordmark first — it's set in a heavy geometric sans, letter-spaced, and it's the highest-contrast element in the frame — then drops to "NEVER GONNA / GIVE YOU UP" underneath in a lighter weight of the same face, then finally to the face in the photo, which is small relative to the frame and partially soft-focused by the original video's own cinematography, not the thumbnail design.
The title-on-thumbnail and the video title are near-duplicates: the image says "RICK ASTLEY / NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP," the video title says "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video) (4K Remaster)." Nothing on the thumbnail earns a click that the title text doesn't already give away — for a channel this size that's fine (people click on recognition, not curiosity), but it's worth naming because it's the opposite of what usually works for a new channel: you're trading curiosity for instant brand recognition, and that trade only pays off once viewers already know who you are. The "4K" badge is doing real work for exactly one audience — people who specifically want the remaster over the 2009 upload — and it's small enough (the white block bottom-left) that it survives shrinking to 320px, which is the right call. The photo itself is the weakest asset in the frame: it's a soft-focus mid-90s music-video still with a hand gesture that reads as mid-word rather than a clear expression, and it's confined to the right two-thirds while a third of the canvas is spent on a flat colour panel that could've held more of the image instead.
Written by an AI that looked at your thumbnail — it's one opinion, and it doesn't know your audience like you do.
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A real roast of a public, well-known subject — not a customer submission, and not an example anyone sent us.
Free roast delivered to your inbox — usually within a few hours. No card, no account, no obligation to buy anything.
Being straight with you about two things: the roast is written by an AI that looks at your actual thumbnail and title, not by a human reviewer. And this one is genuinely free — the only paid option is the €9 deep roast below, which covers ten thumbnails you send us instead of one. You never have to buy it.
The free roast above covers one thumbnail. The deep roast takes your last 10 and reads them as a set — which is usually where the real problem is hiding.
You get the habit you're repeating across all ten, which ones are pulling their weight and what makes them different, and a concrete fix list for each — the same blunt read, ten times over.
How it works: after checkout you land on a one-page uploader and send us the title and thumbnail for each of your last 10 videos. We don't go into your channel — nothing is connected, no access is granted, and the roast is written only from what you upload. Fewer than 10 is fine; it takes a couple of minutes.
Get the €9 deep roast€9 one-off, not a subscription. The single-thumbnail roast above stays free.
Yes. The single-thumbnail roast charges you nothing — no card, no account, no obligation to buy anything. The only paid option is the €9 deep roast, which reads your last 10 thumbnails as a set. You never have to buy it.
No. Nothing is connected and no access is granted — for the free roast you upload one thumbnail, and for the €9 deep roast you land on a one-page uploader after checkout and send the title and thumbnail for each of your last 10 videos. We don't visit or fetch your channel; the roast is written only from what you upload, and fewer than 10 is fine.
By an AI. It looks at your actual thumbnail and title — there is no human reviewer behind this, and it isn't a template with your channel name dropped in.
An honest first-impression read of what your thumbnail communicates in the half-second it gets in a crowded feed, the specific problems named rather than "make it pop", three alternative titles, and a plain list of changes to make to the image in priority order.
It's emailed back to you, usually within a few hours.
Channels under 1,000 subscribers, where the thumbnail and title are doing most of the work and the paid tools are priced for channels that already make money.
It's used to write your roast and nothing else — it's never published, never shown to anyone else, and never used as an example. No list sharing, and you can unsubscribe any time.
An experiment by Tireless Labs — an autonomous, AI-operated venture lab.