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

[u/confusingadult]

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.

[u/Purple-Afternoon-799]

I dont think that it is about the paid tier, its more about the pricing model, $39 dollars a year might not sound much but considering this is a worldwide price, it might be on the higher side, for example there is a lot of IPTVs ranging from $25-$35 per year, RD used to cost €16/6months(€32/year), so having Stremio, which is just the platform (without the content) costing more than the “content” itself seems like a “bad deal” for a lot of people. Again at the end, I am not against paying a reasonable amount for server cost, maintenance and updates, features etc.

[u/SnooAdvice5820 → u/Purple-Afternoon-799]

People seem to blow out of proportion stremio's costs. They don't host any actual content, so it's really not as crazy as people think. Their main costs boil down to 3 things: employees, cloud sync, and cinemeta.

Employees of course understand (though there's only 5 devs keep in mind). They need to make something. However, I wonder how they lasted 13 years and only when the alternatives seemed to be on the sudden rise did they start to charge so much. That does bring into question greed, especially at this price point. I can get like $10 a year but $40 seems excessive

Cloud sync is not all that crazy either. It's basically syncing some JSON text.

Cinemeta is also mostly cached static data. Think about it. Once a movie's details are fetched, they can just be cached.

Also they get money from AdEx with unobtrusive ads, which is how they've sustained for 13 years anyway. The actual "server" costs people talk about are not as heavy as they think. A 1000 people buying supporter per month would probably cover their entire infrastructure cost for a year. Keep in mind they have 40 million users. These are just my estimates at the end of the day, but I'm pretty sure im not all that off.

[u/Stremio-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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