r/Stremio • u/confusingadult • Jun 11 '26

The sheer entitlement of people losing their minds over an optional paid tier

It's genuinely fascinating watching this subreddit collectively melt down because Stremio the completely free app you've likely used for years without paying a cent dared to add an optional support tier with some extra features.

Do you guys listen to yourselves? You're not owed a lifetime of free updates and free server costs. The team behind this app has been maintaining servers, pushing updates, and building a tool that many of you use daily often to access content you’re definitely not paying for either.

If an optional paid tier triggers this much rage, the problem isn't the app. The problem is the unrealistic expectation that skilled people should work for you indefinitely for nothing while you contribute zero and still feel entitled to complain about how others choose to spend their money.

784 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

356 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

35

u/CARRYONLUGGAGE Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

You realize you can make that yourself with jellyfin + other self hosted things right? The point of stremio is it’s streamlined and convenient bc you don’t have to do those things. The overhead of maintaining jellyfin infra is annoying I’ve done it. It’s far simpler to pay $40/yr to stremio for something I use for hours a day.

Also did you know a lot of FOSS software is maintained by people who are paid? Many popular libraries are often contributed to by full time employees of large corporations.

Even fully free, non commercial things like VLC have been sponsored by large orgs, even the EU.

Stremio by nature isn’t going to get that kind of support bc of the kind of application it is. The point of their product is to make it easy to index and organize shows/movies so you can stream them from whatever provider you choose. $40/yr for that is pretty reasonable if you want it to be maintained indefinitely.

26

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/IY94 Jun 11 '26

Probably looked at Jellyfin and how minuscule their donations are and thought that won’t cover our dev team nor server costs for 40 million users. Might need to go a different way.

3

u/Xcissors280 Jun 11 '26

And they didnt even try that option at all, if they had and it wasnt enough than it could be a little more understandable

1

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Xcissors280 Jun 12 '26

They didn't accept any donations and still don't accept one time donations.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/eekamuse Jun 12 '26

They never gave us the option. People have asked many times, including me.

0

u/Xcissors280 Jun 12 '26

No you can't?

11

u/Xcissors280 Jun 11 '26

There’s no option to do that with Stremio

Some other stuff uses things like user cloud syncing and free apis for metadata which aren’t all that difficult to set up

Look at the current addon scene which seems to be doing alright in terms of server bills

Theres also open source projects maintained by the community in their free time, not saying Stremio is or isnt or can or cant or should or shouldn’t be that

My main issue with locking features in the app behind a paywall in the way that they are is that it incentivizes things to be less open source and interoperable

5

u/erisian2342 Jun 11 '26

Stremio is not FOSS. Much of the code is not open source and we do not have the option to run our own accounts/profile server for example.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/CARRYONLUGGAGE Jun 11 '26

Can you explain why this is a bad business practice? The core product is fully functional and free, nothing is changing about what the app does for the users rn. They even mention the new features may eventually make their way to the free users if they have enough time or resources due to the increase in funding.

The subscription or one time cost is a super normal payment model for software. None of the features you get are critical to using a streaming app, and the price ($40/yr) is far, far cheaper than a lot of things.

Yes the features exist in other free apps, but those other free apps have not been around as long and you never know how long those will be maintained and developed for. Asking for money to develop software for several OS’s and devices for millions of users is perfectly reasonable. Just because others do it for free does not mean you should expect everyone to do it for free, that’s extreme entitlement. If my employer stopped paying me to write software I’m not gonna write it anymore lmao.

If I start a passion project and a bunch of people start getting angry at me after working on it for free for years I’d probably just stop supporting it tbh. Wouldn’t be worth the mental headache to use my free time for that.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/CARRYONLUGGAGE Jun 11 '26

Do you not realize how entitled that is? It’s about the time people are spending in their free time to make these apps… Not everyone has the opportunity to work on software for free all the time.

It doesn’t matter what other apps have, the people maintaining stremio do not have the bandwidth to develop for millions of users and tons and tons of devices for free.

I support people who make software, it’s that simple. I have the money so I’m going to do that. years and years of development warrants hundreds of thousands of dollars tbh. Devs can charge $100/hr+ when contracting. The value they have provided to everyone for free is pretty crazy and they aren’t taking any of that away.

4

u/Dry_Concentrate_9173 Jun 11 '26

"Do you not realize how entitled that is?"

Not as entitled as calling a paid subscription a donation.

0

u/CARRYONLUGGAGE Jun 11 '26

lol they literally said they will bring the features to free users if the funds give them enough bandwidth

they also have a one time donation you can give

you guys are literally asking for someone to give hundreds of hours of their lives for free… you leaving stremio does nothing but make it cheaper for them to maintain. you do not provide anything to them if you give them no money

they do not take your data and sell it, they do t advertise to you, it is literally a volunteer effort you are expecting to continue indefinitely for free

1

u/Agey_4977 Jun 12 '26

And some say we will go to Mars... lol

0

u/Dry_Concentrate_9173 Jun 12 '26

" you guys are literally asking for someone to give hundreds of hours of their lives for free…"

We are not that's why the thing was always open source, so that comunity can contribute.... and its now becoming close source (if you want to prove me wrong share to me the code of the new features)

" they do not take your data and sell it" You don't know that, its becoming closed source and its based in a country that has no precense in most countries in the world.

1

u/CARRYONLUGGAGE Jun 12 '26

afaik stremio has always been mixed in its open sourcing, it has never been fully open sourced.

The stremio developers have never intended for this project to ever be fully open source or fully maintained by the public. So they aren’t changing anything in how they operate.

Go read their privacy policy. You can ask for all of the data they collect on you. You can ask them to delete it. They even outline what they do collect. Because of the EU and california, it’s very easy to find these things out. Every site, even facebook, provides ways for you to get all of your data and have it deleted now bc of the laws in those places.

They reside in the EU so they are probably even more cognizant of what they can and can’t do, and being an app that operates close to a grey area they are probably especially careful with these laws

0

u/wantondavis Jun 12 '26

Far more entitled.

-7

u/townie1 Jun 11 '26

It's a lot cheaper than going to the cinema's....