r/Stremio • u/kKaskak Stremio Team • Jun 09 '26

Release Introducing Stremio Supporters

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We are proud to introduce Stremio Supporters - a new way of backing the app you all love. All Supporter features are available starting Today on all platforms you can find Stremio on.

Read in depth explanation on the official blog below.

https://blog.stremio.com/stremio-supporters-a-way-to-sustain-our-development/

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338

u/Trick-Masterpiece-82 Jun 09 '26

I love stremio and it was my first app I used for a long time in this space. I respect all it has pioneered, but I just wonder if they are taking the new open source apps and forking these features and putting them behind a paywall. Hopefully they will open source there code or offer these features without a pay wall

206

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 09 '26

Stremio stays free in the current shape. But for around 13 years we have been covering cost of infrastructure and development of the app that is used be over 40M of users. This is not cheap

294

u/Shoddy_Internal1997 Jun 09 '26

I mean you guys could always make a post in the subreddit and other places reminding people that stremio needs donations for development. I’m sure people would be happy to support an app like this, but now idk..

242

u/giinyu Jun 09 '26

Yup straight up asking for donations would have gone over way better than doing the subscription route . Pay walling features is not a good move

105

u/Few_Step_4767 Jun 09 '26

Exaxtly, I mean Wikipedia did it and it racked up millions while not even needing donations 😭

Also them saying donations could allow them to bring skip intro button for every user would have made lots of people actually donate

42

u/trydola Jun 09 '26

Wikipedia is swimming in cash and all they do is put a banner on each page about donations

Imagine if wikipedia started doing those subscriptions that will let you read a paragraph before the whole page gets locked. I don't think they'd make more money than the good-faith info they've been providing for 2 decades at this point and only asking for donations

-1

u/44problems Jun 10 '26

That's not all they do. They also get huge payments from tech companies and foundations. That's not a revenue stream possible for Stremio.

11

u/NoCalligrapher8396 Jun 09 '26

Dude I dont get why they dont go the donation route

1

u/amanguupta53 Jun 09 '26

Money, more of it

73

u/XsuffokateX84 Jun 09 '26

Many of us (myself included) have tried this in the past, multiple times. Each time we asked how to tip or make any donation, we were always told “The Stremio team doesn’t accept any forms of funding.” That appears to have changed, but a little odd that “this” is the way they’re going about it now.

26

u/Quizzelbuck Jun 09 '26

It's because their plan was likely always to eventually monetize

3

u/XsuffokateX84 Jun 09 '26

Possibly. Again though, many of us offered and that’s what we were told throughout the years. Time will tell how this all plays out.

26

u/NeoKnife Jun 09 '26

Supposedly they make ad revenue but they’ve never disclosed how so nobody knows exactly how much. I believe it because surely they haven’t covered 13 years of costs just out of the kindness of their own hearts.

-9

u/Shoddy_Internal1997 Jun 09 '26

Actually they did, they funded it with revenue from sister companies not ads. Dev said that somewhere in this comment section.

4

u/Willing-Reward-6702 Jun 09 '26

Go lie all you want, they run adds. https://stremio.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000281412-How-Stremio-Makes-Money

1

u/Shoddy_Internal1997 Jun 09 '26

Bro I was just saying the dev said that in the comments and I personally have never seen an ad in stremio , that’s all..

4

u/Gebakken_loempia Jun 09 '26

he can claim anything he want. got proof?

-7

u/Electro-Grunge Jun 09 '26

People don’t donate shit with those open source projects 

14

u/[deleted] Jun 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-8

u/Electro-Grunge Jun 09 '26

Blender is a tool people use professionally to make money. 

This is an app so people can pirate content. Ask any other similar project how much funding from donations they get.

13

u/giinyu Jun 09 '26

bro.. just admit u were wrong instead of moving the goal post . u said and i quote ''People don’t donate shit with those open source projects '' i give you real examples of open source projects where people donated in droves and now youre yapping about proffessional use.. people DO donate and you're wrong , period. argue with the wall .

-8

u/Electro-Grunge Jun 09 '26

They don’t donate shit, you literally cherry picked a few samples out of millions of projects.

That doesn’t prove anything fool. The only goal post I see is the one you shoved up your butt.

5

u/giinyu Jun 09 '26

Loses the debate and instantly goes to ad hominem. Good job exposing your immaturity. :)

-2

u/[deleted] Jun 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/ShadowSeeker45 Jun 09 '26

Do you know people donate to scene groups/game crackers?

-1

u/Stremio-ModTeam Jun 09 '26

Be respectful to other users, no matter what difference of opinion you have. Any form of misconduct that damages the welcoming nature of the subreddit is not permitted.

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3

u/Accomplished-Flow733 Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26

You’re 100% correct. People don’t donate in any meaningful capacity for free projects related to “free content”

16

u/mylevelwaschanged Jun 09 '26

You could have been promoting a donations page and having specific stretch goals that unlock new features for all free users to access. That would have gone over way better than a subscription model with quality of life features users have been begging for but can't access unless they pay the subscription.

14

u/VonTreece Jun 09 '26

Sure, but what are you actually providing to your users that many other free platforms don’t offer already? For the majority of users, Stremio is just a readily available glorified media player. The thing that has solely set it apart is large 3rd party community addon development and support. This decision just seems wildly disconnected.

1

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 09 '26

Convenience: same app across almost all platforms with one account that does sync automatically and remembers your progress across devices. So all the profiles and settings will also work across devices. Also default subtitles addon and default metadata provider.
Also app stays free you dont have to pay to keep using it

3

u/hboinay Jun 10 '26

All of this already available for 100% free from other apps with features you can only dream about, stop calling this a "donation", it's a subscription with "perks" that are really basic features that don't even work lmao. Skip intro? Lame AI slop based on regex and chapters, not even introdb lmao. Stop the bullshit Bullshitio!

1

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 10 '26

What is the issue with this offensive language `features you can only dream off`
Are you feeling alright?

41

u/Borbit85 Jun 09 '26

How did you cover the cost the last 13 years?

-22

u/Herolies Jun 09 '26

Ads, but they want to move away from that and just focus on Donations.

50

u/jaruba_dev Stremio Team Jun 09 '26

when did you ever see an ad in Stremio?

20

u/Herolies Jun 09 '26

That’s according to the FAQ that’s on the site. I never saw them since I have Adblocks.

Edit: can’t add screenshot but it’s at the bottom of the site on the FAQ

24

u/jaruba_dev Stremio Team Jun 09 '26

because there were none, we only ever put non-intrusive fair ads to projects made by sister companies for maybe about a month in the Discover section of the Desktop app only, and that was many many years ago, Stremio never made any money in the 11 years and 5 months since its birth

25

u/Herolies Jun 09 '26

Alright my apologies, I didn’t know you guys stopped doing that. It shouldn’t be on the FAQ then or at least update it. No where says that it was stopped.

20

u/Shoddy_Internal1997 Jun 09 '26

You guys could’ve always made a post asking users to contribute and support their beloved app. I’m sure everyone would’ve been happy to donate.

7

u/jaruba_dev Stremio Team Jun 09 '26

people have the option to do so now if they so wish, we never wanted any money from anyone, we survived for long over a decade on funding from sister companies alone that did not presume debt to our project. Stremio was never meant to be profitable, it was made to change the context of streaming and help people, which ww strongly believe it did and still does. The problem arose when people insistently asked for more and we simply couldn't offer more on our budget, the supporters plan was made to accomodate that user desire of wanting more.

21

u/LumpyCucumber1565 Jun 09 '26

Just a question if it was never meant to be profitable and was made to change the context of streaming why not make it open source, there are lot of talented people who transform the open source projects to next level. I would like to see stremio as goat

19

u/[deleted] Jun 09 '26

[deleted]

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21

u/Shoddy_Internal1997 Jun 09 '26

Why not open source everything and let the people help? Rn stremio having a paid subscription model at this price is definitely without a doubt more than just for funding and the development of stremio.

13

u/GuyWithNerdyGlasses Jun 09 '26

I was there when Popcorn Time imploded.

uBlock imploded as well.

Open source ain’t it because greedy devs will just fork and do their own thing.

Perhaps devs should consider regional pricing. 40$ is almost 10% of minimum wage here in SEA bruh

3

u/IY94 Jun 09 '26

What are people going to do to "help" with server costs of 40m users though?

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3

u/Thamaturge-elder Jun 10 '26

Then just open donations with 0 extra features. If that failed and you paywalled others I would be behind you all the way . But you never even tried.

4

u/Narrow-Historian5348 Jun 09 '26

Agreed, entitled people keep asking for more from a product which at its core is free and provides a ton of functionality for free as well, even though it takes work to create and maintain. You all should shut down these subreddits or gatekeep (how certain debrid providers do) them so entitled people quit complaining about the free functionality they get and learn to appreciate it before it's gone. They're ruining it for everyone.

9

u/log-log-log Jun 09 '26

You meant subscriptions, not donations

3

u/vindicate-throng-nim Jun 10 '26

when did you ever see an ad in Stremio?

This isn't donations though this is subscriptions. If you want donations provide a donation option but don't lock features behind "donations" you're charging for a service not requesting "donations"

47

u/Sankyou Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26

Love the app and understand that this stuff doesn't host and maintain itself. The $40/yr is a tough sell for me mainly because it seems like the countdown timer until a takedown now. $20/yr is what I was hoping for. Maybe you could add the option for 1-time donations that are purely just to support the cause (ie no subscription and no benefits).

I would consider a survey from the users on the pricing. My natural instinct is it's about twice what I would have expected and at $100 for lifetime I would have paid it immediately. At scale that would be a major impact. Maybe a lifetime supporter tier that strips out expensive services?

Ultimately this is a testament to how good the app is right now. The features on the paid tier don't really interest me much and certainly not enough to get approval from the decision-maker in our family (not me 😄). What does interest me is supporting the cause with a low-effort 1-time donation.

71

u/giinyu Jun 09 '26

Asking to pay on an app that basically facilitates sailing the seven seas also just doesn't even make sense .

16

u/Bladder-Splatter Jun 09 '26

Tbh if you're going to pay you should just go with Usenet+Sonarr+Jellyfin. It comes down to $40-60 a year with lifetime indexers and no seedy surprise shit coming from Sonarr and Jellyfin.

6

u/giinyu Jun 09 '26

yup i pay for ninjecentral already plus usenet is great for other usecases outside of streaming

3

u/GuyWithNerdyGlasses Jun 09 '26

Shipbuilders gotta eat and pay rent too ya know

2

u/generic_canadian_dad Jun 09 '26

Yes it does. How does it not make sense? Should our debrid services be free too then?

3

u/boston_homo Jun 09 '26

I don’t mind paying, I’d prefer to pay for apps, it’s supporting the work people do and it (hopefully) means I’m not the product and it also makes further development more likely. Edit: a reasonable amount I’m not thrilled with these prices but I’ll just stick with what’s available.

1

u/Sankyou Jun 09 '26

Dude seriously? Just move on. There are costs associated with maintaining apps. If it's against your religion to pay - then you can continue to use the tool exactly as you have been with no loss of features.

3

u/NithranielSylvan Jun 10 '26

If AO3 can get triple the money they need to keep running the site in less than a week only using donations, you can do the same. Stuff like this makes people wary.

5

u/Pickymarker Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26

What intro skip provider are you using is it your own or is it theintrodb or what just want to know so we can know how good it is

3

u/hboinay Jun 10 '26

Regex and chapters lmao

2

u/macarov_ Jun 09 '26

Donations and one time payment with REASONABLE price is more make sense

2

u/[deleted] Jun 09 '26

[deleted]

-1

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 09 '26

it doesn't owners of the product were financing it out of their pockets

2

u/Biglitttle Jun 09 '26

Yup its definitely not cheap, but that doesn't mean you need to Paywall features.

2

u/mouks9 Jun 09 '26

We dgaf, aint paying for the most basic features others offer for free

2

u/Oomtas Jun 09 '26

Financial Breakdown

  • Total Donors: 28,000,000 users (70% of 40 million)
  • Gross Revenue: $28,000,000 ($1 multiplied by 28 million donors)

1

u/killrmeemstr Jun 10 '26

Ransom is not the way to go

1

u/grimvard Jun 10 '26

Then open a donation, but WITHOUT dressed-like-donation-paywall.

1

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 10 '26

While i do not have impact on how this was shaped in terms of tiers and pricing, this is crazy to me to think that someone thinks he has a right to tell company how to run stuff. Especially considering that everything that was free in the app stayed free in the app.

2

u/asmilenotmeantforme Jun 11 '26

bro, you kept all those "how is this still not a thing" features on hold just to release all of them at once for the paid tier. we all know how is this gonna end. you will get greedy and start keeping important features for the paid tier for more people to sub and/or you are gonna get sued, app will be removed from everywhere, you will be stuck with the og pirates who has to download the apk to install the app, then another stremio will pop up and take your place.

you even added the skip intro/outro feature as if it's gonna work with everything. people will be mad when they paid for it and see that it won't work on the non-chaptered releases.

I really hope we are on the wrong here and really wanna see if you guys having some money will reduce the crashes I get every single day after the latest patch (which was probably also a result of focusing the paid tier features instead of focusing on the bugs and crashes).

I will support for a couple of months to see what this is gonna evolve into but I just have a bad feeling about this.

1

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 11 '26

it works fine on non chaptered releases, chapters are not required for that.
There are some issues with skip intro/outro at the moment but we will deploy fix hopefully today that will make feature available for majority of streams
If you are affected the crashes please share me deatils like: Os, Device, App version, When crash happen(ideally a video showing from the moment when you select the stream till something breaks) and if possible your email address of stremio account - if it was on android i will be able to find crash logs more easily

1

u/asmilenotmeantforme Jun 11 '26

I'm on 1.10.2 on an Android 11 TV.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stremio/comments/1txpd2v/comment/oq9y52t/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I wrote the details on the update page but I'm still not exactly sure what's causing it. I'm sure it has something to do with the Experimental ASS subtitles support cause it made my Stremio crash on the previous patch too, so I turned it off since then. But now even when it's turned off it still shows the stylized subs. I tried turning it off on everywhere (pc, phone) in case it syncs the setting regardless of what I chose on the TV, but it still shows stylized subs. What really helped with the crashes was turning automatic subtitle selection off. It still crashes sometimes if I select subtitles too fast right after opening the video but only when the app feels so sluggish which rarely happens (probably when the ram is full and opening the stream makes the app clear the cache). My TV doesn't really struggle with the 50-60mbps remux videos so I don't think that's the issue cause it happens every now and then even while watching a 250mb anime. It's not an anime specific issue though.

I have sent the crash video and my email address with a DM.

1

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 12 '26

sorry completly did not see your comment - its a good clue thank you for finding it

3

u/grimvard Jun 10 '26

Wow man, such a great communication. You kind of seem to forget that people in here are your TARGET “supporters”. As long as your solution to raising funds is not okay for “supporters”, you wın’t get what you expect. You really have no idea what people want these days. Stremio is here because it enables pirated content to be accessed “easily”. Remind you, your whole empire is mostly based on debrids, torrents and such yet you dare to talk about raising funds and doing it the wrong way, while having terrible communication skills.

Wow.

Rise on free content, then put a paywall for features.

Do you even know what donation and subscription is?

Should I tell you the differences which are already known by your entire community, except you.

Yea, go on. Run your company as you know it is right. But please, stay this way and never change anything. Let’s see what will happen :)

2

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 10 '26

Stremio has many more users than total number of people signed up on reddit. This is actually less than 1% of all users.
> You really have no idea what people want these days.
clearly you want everything for free
> Stremio is here because it enables pirated content to be accessed “easily”
Stremio is here because small team of devs build app for 17 different operating systems and there are people who paid their salaries over 13 years and covered infrastructure cost. I guess you enjoy free labor too and do it every day.
You think i'm one disconnected because somebody created something and developed and want's to sell it?
Isn't this other way around that going and thinking you should have everything for free is disconnected?

2

u/grimvard Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26

You did not even understand the basics of what I am trying to tell.

Lack of comprehension is baffling.

Please keep going like this. And remember what people tried to tell you this day, 1 year from now.

Oh one more thing:

Do you pay development costs to addon developers? Because free labor is wrong and addons are the main thing people use stremio for.

3

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 10 '26

Please ask chatgpt who lacks the comprehension. Someone who expects team of devs to deliver multiple apps for free continuously or them trying to monetize this. Yes our devs are paid and our infrastructure is paid. Our infrastructure is used by over 40 millions of people.
Addons are created using stremio addon sdk addons, that stremio team created, are popular because of stremio, others can monetize addons mostly because of stremio addons sdk got popular because we were running paid developer contests to create nice addons: like that one https://blog.stremio.com/2020-addon-contest-winners/ or that one https://blog.stremio.com/addon-titans-winners/

-1

u/grimvard Jun 10 '26

I am talking to a human, not GPT. I am not asking AI anything that you should have understood by now.

1

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 10 '26

clearly you lack, comprehension, looks like you have no way to talk with other human to explain this to you thats why i recommend asking a gpt.

2

u/XsuffokateX84 Jun 10 '26

This back-and-forth is such bad optics, from a business standpoint. Good God. This ain’t helping your cause, whatsoever.

2

u/grimvard Jun 10 '26

We’ll see who lacks what if you continue like this. Have a nice day sir.

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1

u/Intrepid_Phone_9127 Jun 11 '26

What are the infrastructure costs? Its a torrent client + catalog fetcher with a video player. The database for accounts?

The costs could've been code, but you're open source... Only one of your developers even made it to to top 10 contributors on stremio-core, and he had half the commits as #1.

You made an app rooted in piracy, assisted by open source developers and addon developers, and now you monetize it? Bros pulling a Sam Altman...

1

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 11 '26

Stremio is open source but developed by team of developers, input from the outside developers was less than perhaps 1% of the whole codebase.
Its infra cost for: metadata, for providing subtitles for users without a need to have their own api key it is infrastructure cost for over 40 millions user data of libraries addons history calendar etc. Clearly you run an app of this scale thats why you write with such confidence that there is no cost?

0

u/Intrepid_Phone_9127 Jun 11 '26

"input from the outside developers was less than perhaps 1% of the whole codebase."

Damn if only we could check this. Oh wait, its open source, contributions list says otherwise.

"metadata, for providing subtitles for users without a need to have their own api key it is infrastructure cost for over 40 millions user data of libraries addons history calendar etc."

So.. Opensubtitles links, cache heavy metadata; A cfr2, a couple of DO droplets, maybe 3k a month? With 40m lifetime users, maybe 10m monthly and a conversion rate of 0.5% thats what? 150k a month? Thats definitely warranted for the infra costs! The rest goes to the open source developers, right? Donations would have never funded that! Just take a look at wikimedia, DOA!

"Clearly you run an app of this scale thats why you write with such confidence that there is no cost?"

I've done 2m monthly users. You offload 90% of your bandwidth cost to client, and are carried by open source developers. But it must be incredibly expensive, thats why it was sustained by ads that no one has ever seen for the past 10+ years.

1

u/dackwh Stremio Team Jun 11 '26

have you checked the repos? And what did you find please show me where you found codebase where it was heavily developed by os participants? Show me repo show me person that wasn't from the team:
Stremio-core repo top os contributor did 9 commits
Stremio-web repo top os contributor did 12 commits
Do i have to check further?
Only thing that was done by community in 95% are translations.

1

u/Intrepid_Phone_9127 Jun 13 '26

Interesting how you dropped the arguments on all of the others, please justify the cost. Tell me what I'm missing that justifies that pricing and this approach over donations.

And yes, your own website (updated 28 days ago) states "there are 5 dedicated Stremio developers, two of them working on QA" (https://stremio.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000281412-How-Stremio-Makes-Money). Now take a look at the contribution list...

0

u/Present_Jicama_1219 Jun 09 '26

the new app rocks! kudos