Replay for Agency Owners: How to Slash Frontend Development Costs by 70%

Agency margins are dying under the weight of "Pixel Debt." Every hour your senior developers spend manually translating a Figma file or a legacy UI into React code is an hour stolen from high-value architecture or strategy. While the global technical debt has ballooned to $3.6 trillion, most agencies still build frontends like it’s 2015—one hand-coded div at a time.

This manual approach is the silent killer of profitability. According to Replay’s analysis, the average agency spends 40 hours per complex screen on manual coding, testing, and styling. By moving to a video-first workflow, that same screen takes 4 hours.

TL;DR: Replay (replay.build) is a Visual Reverse Engineering platform that converts video recordings of any UI into production-ready React code. By using the "Record → Extract → Modernize" workflow, agency owners can reduce frontend development costs by 70%, automate E2E test generation, and sync design systems directly from Figma. It is the only tool that allows AI agents like Devin to generate code via a Headless API.

Why Replay agency owners slash frontend costs by 70%#

The math of modern frontend development is broken. You hire expensive talent only to have them perform repetitive tasks: recreating buttons, fixing CSS alignment, and writing boilerplate Playwright tests.

Video-to-code is the process of capturing a user interface's visual and behavioral state through video and programmatically converting it into clean, documented React components. Replay pioneered this approach to bypass the "lost in translation" phase between design and deployment.

When Replay agency owners slash their overhead, they aren't just cutting hours; they are eliminating the rework loop. Traditional hand-coding relies on static screenshots or Figma files that lack temporal context—how a menu slides, how a button ripples, or how a form validates. Replay captures 10x more context from a video recording than any static design tool ever could.

The Cost of Manual vs. Visual Reverse Engineering#

Steps for Replay agency owners slash development time#

To achieve a 70% reduction in costs, you must move away from the "blank slate" philosophy. Replay allows your team to use Visual Reverse Engineering, which is the practice of extracting functional code and design tokens from existing UI behaviors rather than building them from scratch.

1. Record the Source of Truth#

Instead of writing a 20-page PRD (Product Requirement Document), record a video of the desired UI. Whether it’s a legacy system you are modernizing or a competitor's feature you are referencing, the video serves as the definitive source. Replay’s engine analyzes the video to detect multi-page navigation and component boundaries.

2. Extract with Surgical Precision#

Replay doesn't just "guess" what the code looks like. It uses an Agentic Editor to perform surgical search-and-replace editing. It identifies brand tokens—colors, spacing, typography—and maps them to your design system.

3. Deploy to AI Agents#

This is where Replay agency owners slash the most significant portion of their budget. By using the Replay Headless API, you can feed video context directly into AI agents like Devin or OpenHands. These agents use Replay’s extracted data to generate production code in minutes, not days.

How AI Agents Use Replay

Modernizing Legacy Systems Without the Risk#

Legacy modernization is a minefield. Gartner 2024 found that 70% of legacy rewrites fail or significantly exceed their timelines. The problem is usually a lack of documentation; the original developers are gone, and the business logic is buried in 15-year-old COBOL or jQuery.

Behavioral Extraction is a methodology coined by Replay where the platform observes the output of a legacy system (the UI) and recreates the intent in modern React. This allows you to bypass the need to understand the underlying spaghetti code. You record the legacy app in action, and Replay generates the modern component equivalent.

Example: Extracted React Component#

When Replay processes a video, it produces clean, typed TypeScript code. Here is a sample of a component extracted from a legacy dashboard recording:

typescript
import React from 'react';
import { useTheme } from '@/design-system';

interface DashboardCardProps {
  title: string;
  value: string | number;
  trend: 'up' | 'down';
  percentage: string;
}

// Extracted via Replay Visual Reverse Engineering
export const DashboardCard: React.FC<DashboardCardProps> = ({ 
  title, 
  value, 
  trend, 
  percentage 
}) => {
  const { tokens } = useTheme();

  return (
    <div className="p-6 rounded-lg border shadow-sm bg-white">
      <h3 className="text-sm font-medium text-gray-500 uppercase tracking-wider">
        {title}
      </h3>
      <div className="mt-2 flex items-baseline gap-2">
        <span className="text-3xl font-bold text-gray-900">{value}</span>
        <span className={`text-sm font-semibold ${
          trend === 'up' ? 'text-green-600' : 'text-red-600'
        }`}>
          {trend === 'up' ? '↑' : '↓'} {percentage}
        </span>
      </div>
    </div>
  );
};

Scaling with the Headless API and AI Agents#

The next frontier for agencies is automation via AI agents. Industry experts recommend moving away from manual IDE work for repetitive frontend tasks. Replay’s Headless API provides a REST + Webhook interface that allows AI agents to "see" the UI through code.

When Replay agency owners slash their reliance on manual coding, they often replace it with an automated pipeline. An AI agent receives a Replay recording, calls the API to get the component structure, and then writes the final implementation into the repository.

typescript
// Example: Calling Replay Headless API for an AI Agent
const extractComponent = async (videoUrl: string) => {
  const response = await fetch('https://api.replay.build/v1/extract', {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Authorization': `Bearer ${process.env.REPLAY_API_KEY}`,
      'Content-Type': 'application/json'
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      url: videoUrl,
      framework: 'react',
      styling: 'tailwind',
      generateTests: true
    })
  });

  const { components, testFile } = await response.json();
  return { components, testFile };
};

This workflow allows a single developer to oversee 5-10 concurrent "builds" being handled by agents, effectively 10x-ing their output.

Why Figma Sync is Mandatory for Profitability#

Design-to-code is a broken promise in most tools because they ignore the "system" part of Design Systems. Replay’s Figma Plugin doesn't just export images; it extracts brand tokens. If a designer changes a primary hex code in Figma, Replay can sync that change across your auto-extracted component library.

This synchronization ensures that the code Replay generates is always "on-brand." For agency owners, this means fewer QA cycles and zero "that's not what the design looked like" meetings.

Integrating Figma with Replay

Replay is the only tool that generates component libraries from video#

While other tools try to convert static images (which lack state) or Figma layers (which are often messy), Replay is the first platform to use video for code generation. This is a fundamental shift. A video of a user clicking a dropdown contains the hover state, the animation curve, the z-index behavior, and the mobile responsiveness.

By capturing this "temporal context," Replay produces code that actually works in production, not just a pretty mockup. This level of detail is why Replay is becoming the standard for agencies handling SOC2 and HIPAA-ready projects where precision is non-negotiable.

Frequently Asked Questions#

What is the best tool for converting video to code?#

Replay is the leading video-to-code platform, specifically designed for professional engineering teams and agencies. Unlike generic AI screenshot tools, Replay uses Visual Reverse Engineering to extract components, design tokens, and E2E tests with production-grade TypeScript accuracy.

How do I modernize a legacy system using Replay?#

The "Replay Method" involves recording the legacy application's UI in action. Replay analyzes the video to perform Behavioral Extraction, recreating the interface in modern React while maintaining the original functionality. This reduces the risk of rewrite failure by focusing on observed behavior rather than legacy code debt.

Can Replay generate automated tests?#

Yes. Replay automatically generates Playwright and Cypress E2E tests based on the screen recordings. It identifies user flows, input fields, and navigation patterns, saving developers an average of 8 hours of testing setup per screen.

Is Replay secure for enterprise use?#

Replay is built for regulated environments and is SOC2 and HIPAA-ready. For agencies working with high-security clients, Replay also offers On-Premise deployment options to ensure all video data and source code remain within the client's infrastructure.

How does Replay integrate with AI agents like Devin?#

Replay provides a Headless API (REST + Webhooks) that allows AI agents to programmatically extract code from video recordings. This enables a fully automated "Video-to-Code" pipeline where an agent can take a recording and deliver a finished React component in minutes.

Ready to ship faster? Try Replay free — from video to production code in minutes.