Mavericks is a marketplace of vetted human captioners working to elevate how the world communicates — across language, ability, and noise. Medical lecture, indie film, weekly podcast: there's a specialist who'll get every word right.
A great captioner doesn't just transcribe sound — they preserve meaning. They keep the joke landing, the diagnosis precise, the cross-examination on the record, the lecture clear to the student in the back row. They turn audio into something durable, searchable, translatable, and shareable.
I built Mavericks because I lived this problem. I'm a working CART captioner — the person hired to put live, accurate captions on a screen while a doctor briefs a patient or a witness gives a deposition. I trained at Downey Adult School, won the DRA scholarship in 2022, and I still take shifts most weeks. I've watched the craft get flattened by agencies that quietly keep 70–85% of every contract, and by AI tools that need humans to clean up their hallucinations under someone else's byline. The marketplace is the fix. Captioners set their own rates, keep 85% of what clients pay, and own the relationship with the work. The math is below — see for yourself.
— Tessa Rae Farias, founder & CART captioner
people who depend on captions to access video — for hearing, language, or focus
of social video watched on mute — captions are now the default, not the alt-text
error rate on automated captioning of accented or technical speech — meaning tossed out at scale
The traditional captioning agency takes 70–85% of the contract. The captioner — the person actually doing the work — takes the rest. We flipped it.
Out of every $4.00 the client pays per minute
Out of the same $4.00 — a 4.25x raise for the person doing the work
A working CART captioner on Mavericks at the median rate clears $78,000/year on 25 billable hours a week. The same captioner, billed through a typical agency, would gross around $22,000/year for the same work.
The US is short an estimated 5,000+ qualified captioners and court reporters, and the gap is widening every year. Streaming, remote work, and ADA enforcement have multiplied the demand for captions five-fold since 2018 — but agencies are paying so little that fewer people are entering the profession. We can't fix that without paying captioners what the market actually pays.
Higher take-home pay is the fix nobody else is offering. Three things follow from that.
A 4.25x raise turns captioning from a side hustle back into a career. Retention compounds the supply.
When the math works, theater grads, journalists, and ASL interpreters cross over. We sponsor 50 captioner scholarships in our first year.
Medical, legal, and live CART captioners can finally afford to specialize — which is exactly the talent the market needs most.
Every captioner is vetted with a skills test, two references, and a sample edit. Two ways to book: Instant-book on a captioner's open calendar slot, or send an inquiry for custom needs and they'll reply within hours.
See a captioner's live calendar. Click an open slot, confirm the job, and you're booked. Most slots match within minutes.
For multi-day events, custom NDAs, or specialty work. Captioners reply directly — average first response under 4 hours.
Most jobs are matched in under 15 minutes. You can auto-match and let us pick the right specialist, or hand-pick a captioner from the marketplace.
MP4, MOV, MP3, WAV, or YouTube/Vimeo URL. Tell us the language and turnaround. We'll estimate the price before you commit.
Browse profiles by specialty, rate, and reviews. Or hit auto-match and we'll route to the best available captioner in your tier.
Get SRT, VTT, TXT, or burned-in formats. If accuracy drops below 99%, we re-do it free. Re-hire your favorites with one click.
Generic transcription tools can't tell the difference between a deposition and a podcast. Our captioners can — because they've worked in those rooms.
Pay only for what you caption. Specialists set their own rates within these tiers — you'll always see the final price before you confirm.
Best for podcasts, YouTube, and most long-form video.
When deadlines are tomorrow morning, not next week.
Real-time CART, broadcast, and licensed specialists (medical, legal).
Schools, courthouses, hospitals, and corporate accessibility teams have spent decades locked into agency relationships because nothing else met their compliance, paperwork, and continuity needs. We built Mavericks to clear every one of those hurdles — without losing the cost advantage of the marketplace model.
Accessibility offices, online learning, lectures, athletics, board meetings.
All-hands, conferences, training, marketing video, internal accessibility programs.
Courthouses, depositions, hearings, public meetings, regulatory bodies.
You don't have to give up the captioner you trust to leave the agency that's been billing you for years. Tell us who they are, we'll invite them, and you'll keep working with the same person — at a lower cost to you, and a much higher take-home for them. Most institutional clients cut their captioning bill 30–45% in the first quarter.
Captioning sits inside one of the most regulated corners of accessibility. Every guarantee here exists because Tessa hit the wall on it during her own CART shifts — and because our institutional clients can't afford for us to get it wrong.
Title II (state & local), Title III (public accommodation), and Title I (workplace) — every captioner is trained on what each one requires.
Conformance reports on demand. We meet 1.2.2 (prerecorded captions), 1.2.4 (live), and 1.2.5 (audio description coordination).
Closed-captioning quality standards for broadcast and IP-delivered programming. Burned-in, 608/708, and SCC delivery supported.
Business Associate Agreements signed by counsel, not bolted on. PHI-aware captioners for clinical and CME content.
Annual third-party audit. Encrypted file handling, watermarked previews, role-based access, and 30-day auto-purge.
NCRA, CCRA, RPR, and CRR credentials surfaced on every profile. Court-record-grade captioners are filterable in one click.
Captioner credentials, accuracy report, file versions, and chain of custody — all exportable for ADA, OCR, or DOJ inquiries.
Captioners save your style guide, glossary, and speakers across jobs. Same continuity an agency relationship gives you, without the markup.
Agencies have spent decades quietly keeping the lion's share of what clients pay for captioning. Mavericks flips that split. You set your rate, you keep 85%, and you own the relationship with the client. The 4.25x raise isn't a marketing line — it's the math, on every invoice.
25 billable hrs/week at $2.40/min, the median Mavericks rate. Agency comparison assumes the standard 80/20 split.
I came to captioning the long way around. I studied dance and theater at Hofstra, then acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in LA. For a decade I was on the other side of the words — performing them, listening to scene partners, learning that an "um" can carry as much meaning as a sentence. I tended bar, ran offices, took background work, picked up kids from school. Then in 2020 I sat down at Downey Adult School and started learning to write 225 words a minute.
I won the DRA scholarship in 2022 and started captioning live — courtrooms, depositions, real-time CART for hard-of-hearing clients. I scope and proof for working court reporters. I'm a member of the DRA, NCRA, and CCRA. I still take shifts most weeks, because if I'm building a marketplace for captioners I'd better know what last Tuesday's job felt like.
The math that woke me up: agencies were billing clients $4–$6 a minute and paying me $0.80. AI vendors wanted me to clean up their hallucinations for $0.12 a minute and put their logo on my work. Nobody was building the company a working captioner would actually want to work for. So I'm building it. Every product decision goes through a working captioner before it ships. That's the whole thing.
— Tessa Rae Farias, founder & CART captioner
"We tried three AI tools and Rev before this. Our medical content has terms AI just butchers — Priya gets it right the first time, every time. We re-hired her on six straight projects."
"I used to caption inside an agency for $0.45/min. On Mavericks I set my rate at $2.10 and have a waitlist. The platform handles billing, NDAs, files — I just write."
"Rush jobs used to be a five-email panic. Now I drop the file at 9pm and have SRTs at 8am. I budget for it like I budget for coffee."
AI gets you to ~92% on clean audio with one speaker and zero jargon. Real content has accents, overlap, terminology, sarcasm, and audio that wasn't recorded in a soundproof studio. Our captioners use AI as a starting draft — then edit it to publish-ready. You pay for the edit, which is where accuracy actually comes from.
Rush is 12 hours guaranteed for content under 60 minutes. Most rush jobs come back in 6–8 hours. If we miss the SLA, the job is free.
SRT, VTT, TXT, JSON timecoded transcripts, and burned-in MP4. Custom formats (SCC, EBU-STL, broadcast) available on the Live & Specialist tier.
Application, two professional references, ID verification, a 10-minute sample edit graded by a senior captioner, and a probation period for the first three jobs. Less than 8% of applicants get on the platform.
Yes — that's the point. Hit "Re-hire" on any past job, or save captioners to your team. They keep your style guide, glossary, and speaker list across projects.
Standard NDAs are signed at sign-up and on every job. We support custom NDAs, BAAs (HIPAA), and watermarked previews. Files auto-purge 30 days after delivery unless you tell us otherwise.
Mavericks was founded by Tessa Rae Farias — a CART captioner trained at Downey Adult School, DRA scholarship winner (2022), and member of the DRA, NCRA, and CCRA. She still takes captioning shifts every week. Tessa came to the work after years in theater, film, and live performance, which gave her an ear for how meaning lives in voice. The team is built around working captioners and accessibility specialists, by design.
No credit card. Real captioner. Yours in under 12 hours.