RefereAI MLX gives parents, coaches, and small venues a practical path to local sports video intelligence with the devices they already have.
Tuesday-night pickleball at the YMCA. Four courts running concurrently. Half the calls get argued. She has a $400 program budget for the year and no internet in the gym basement.
Her scorer's table has an old MacBook with a sticker from a 2019 conference. She sets it down, plugs it into the wall, types refereai serve, prints four QR codes on the office copier, and tapes one to each net post. Four parents on the sidelines scan with their phones. Suddenly all four courts have a second opinion on every line call — running on the laptop she already owns, on the Wi-Fi she already pays for, with the phones the parents already brought. Nothing uploads. Nothing renews. Nothing breaks when the gym Wi-Fi flakes out, because it doesn't need the gym Wi-Fi.
refereai serve process handles four phone clients on the same LAN.What it costs: nothing. Free, AGPL, no subscription.
Saturday morning, USTA L7 tournament, four hours from home. Watching their kid's match through a phone screen. SwingVision wants $14.99/month and ships every match to its cloud. They just want a short replay on a contested point — and they don't want their twelve-year-old's tennis in someone else's database.
They pop the MacBook open in the car, balance the phone on a $12 gooseneck tripod courtside, scan the QR from the driver's seat. The match streams phone → Mac → phone over the parking-lot Wi-Fi hotspot off their iPhone. When the kid argues a call two games in, dad pulls up the last twenty seconds on the same phone, frame-stepped, with the ball-track overlay. The match never leaves the family's two devices. Tournament's over, the laptop closes, the footage is gone unless they actively saved it.
What it costs: nothing. Free, AGPL, no subscription.
Twelve courts. Three tournament weekends a year. The incumbent video-analysis vendors quote $30k/court/year for a dedicated installation. The CFO laughs them out of the room.
The director puts a single Mac mini in the office, $5 of Cat6 cable to each court, and twelve cheap Android tablets clipped to the net posts. On Tuesday the tablets are scoreboards for league play. On Saturday the same tablets scan a QR, become tournament cameras, and feed twelve concurrent matches into one refereai serve on the Mac mini. CapEx, not OpEx. Owned, not rented. The vendor's annual invoice never arrives because there is no vendor.
What it costs: nothing. Free, AGPL, no subscription.
Five minutes from curl to a live court overlay. Apple Silicon Mac, phone on the same Wi-Fi, no account.