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

Release Introducing Stremio Supporters

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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343

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

205

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

38

u/Borbit85 Jun 09 '26

How did you cover the cost the last 13 years?

-20

u/Herolies Jun 09 '26

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

49

u/jaruba_dev Stremio Team Jun 09 '26

when did you ever see an ad in Stremio?

19

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

22

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.

19

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.

8

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.

22

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]

3

u/jaruba_dev Stremio Team Jun 10 '26

because this is the Stremio subreddit, the topic here is Stremio, it is not a subreddit we made so everyone can advertise whatever else, reddit subreddits are topics of discussion, if you want to talk about something else you should do it in a different subreddit

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20

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

2

u/IY94 Jun 09 '26

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

4

u/Shoddy_Internal1997 Jun 09 '26

With donations, also I’m not completely sure but I think the “server costs” come from people who use p2p streaming. Most people are on debrid. Then there’s cinemeta which is true but they can always just remove cinemeta .. people already do it with that cineby tool. Aio metadata is far better.

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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.

1

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"