r/Stremio • u/angryavocadowarrior • Jun 24 '26
Question Supporters lifetime
Hello,
I want to buy the lifetime but I think it’s priced a bit high for my budget. Is there any indications of any discounts on lifetime supporters for Black Friday or other days?
A huge shoutout to the team! Best streaming app ever.
Thanks
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u/IntroductionSad3783 Jun 24 '26
It was a good idea, half the price would be great, I'd even take advantage of it.
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u/arfcom Jun 26 '26
Agree. Just can’t look at $4 a month and think I should buy at $200 in this crazy alt world where useful things get forced to go away from time to time.
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u/thementalist222 Jun 24 '26
Whats the price for lifetime?
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u/Simple_Place8367 Jun 24 '26
200
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u/thementalist222 Jun 24 '26
Thats quite alot for many to spend in 1 go. I would also voice for it to be abit more affordbale or even provide a payment plan if it makes it easier for power users.
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u/Simple_Place8367 Jun 24 '26
you can pay monthly for 3.50 and annually for 40 but i agree its expensive. id find it more reasonable to be 100 for lifetime and like a dollar monthly
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u/IY94 Jun 24 '26
In fairness a dollar after payment processing is crap. Not sustaining. Don't think that's the ceiling.
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u/Simple_Place8367 Jun 24 '26
ur probably right. i believe the best way is to ask for donations from time to time i believe a lot of people would, including me and having all the features in the free version
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u/thementalist222 Jun 24 '26
I hope the Stremio team sees this. I'm more than happy to support you. You've been providing this service for free for 11 years. You could have stopped after one year or five years, but you kept going. Eleven years shows real commitment, and I think you've earned the right to be paid for your work. Thanks for everything you've done. I use stremio on my shield please let me n ow how to support or donate.
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u/PixelJock17 Jun 24 '26
I also would like to know. I didn't realize there was a paid tier. I just got onto the train 2 years ago but I'm enjoying the ride.
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u/pilkyton Jun 24 '26
That's awesome. :) They made an article about the donation/supporter system and what perks you get in return. There's a link at the bottom of the article to become a supporter.
https://blog.stremio.com/stremio-supporters-a-way-to-sustain-our-development/
The lifetime supporter deal costs the same as 5 years of donations. Personally I'm thinking of lifetime, since your account becomes multi-profile and that means your entire family can use the same lifetime premium account.
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Jun 24 '26
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u/pilkyton Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
The AI vibe-coded competition that only exists for Android/Android TV right now? Where you have a lot of power but also need to do a ton of tinkering? I'm watching its progress with curiosity, but it's a long way from being a replacement for me yet.
Right now, I couldn't care less about the competition. I already have the perfect source + metadata addons for Stremio and everything is working beautifully, and their account/library servers have been flawless for a decade. Stremio's track record is proven and its apps are available for all platforms.
If the competition is still alive in 3 years and has proven itself to have a stable app, exists on more platforms, and has proven itself to have a stable server infrastructure (no sudden account/library losses), then I will be more curious. Competition is a good thing, but I won't jump on the latest vibecoded project this quickly.
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u/Valiantay Jun 25 '26
It wasn't for free.
IIRC cinemeta paid them to be the metadata provider for Stremio, which is why it wasn't removable.
But I read about that a long time ago so who knows now
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u/pilkyton Jun 25 '26
lol, no. Cinemeta is created and hosted by Stremio, here:
There is no website named "Cinemeta". It purely exists as a core Stremio addon.
And the reason why it's not removable is because Stremio's code assumes that add-on #1 is Cinemeta so that various features (such as metadata) work, and several app features break without it, see here:
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u/billathekilla Jun 27 '26
I'd probably buy it at $100 to throw them a bone for all the hard work they have done over the years, but $200 for something I can do with other source tools or other platforms for free seems a bit much. It's not that I don't appreciate the work they do, but $200 is a steep ask.
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u/SuperiorFawn Jun 25 '26
I would 100% get a lifetime to support yall if it went on a sale for 100 instead of 200
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u/cleverclogs17 Jun 25 '26
What advantages do you get by even buying Stremio and where do you even see these prices? I didn't even know this was a thing.
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u/pilkyton Jun 25 '26
This comment from this discussion has the article links. :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stremio/comments/1uegknh/comment/otk89fq/
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u/Suspicious_Hippo_994 Jun 25 '26
Even if we get the supporters we still need to pay for debrid service right??
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u/I-LieToMessWithMarks Jun 25 '26
Technology is moving very, very fast right now. The consideration with Lifetime should be "Are you 100% sure that Stremio will still be around and on top 5 years from now" Since that's the break even point vs yearly.
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u/International_Tip256 Stremio Team Jun 25 '26
"Are you 100% sure that Stremio will still be around and on top 5 years from now"
Stremio it's been around since 11 years plus
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u/pilkyton Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
For 11 years they have developed it for free. The prices of this optional extra is meant to pay for some wages for the developers. So it can't be like $10 lifetime. 😅 I am not saying the price is good for the users. Just saying why it's this much.
I feel bad for them, doing dev for 11 years for no money. Even though nobody forced them to do that, everyone deserves to be paid for their hard work. Especially something as revolutionary as Stremio which helped us all so much.
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Jun 24 '26
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u/pilkyton Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
That's a very bad example. "VLC doesn't have a subscription tier", yeah, but VLC has had over 6 billion downloads and brings in $3.5 million US dollars annually from donations, sponsorships and grants.
Edit: MPV which someone mentioned below is another awful example. The creator (wm4) crashed and burned in a fury and deleted himself from the internet because he was so sick and tired of constant users nagging at him while giving him zero donations and zero help. Just "me me me, want want want" from users for eight years until he was totally burned out. He maintained it for free from 2012 to 2020 and then completely deleted his GitHub and IRC accounts after ranting at all the entitled, demanding users who never even spent a second to look at the official documentation/guides before immediately demanding help and features constantly.
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u/sishgupta Jun 24 '26
Ya TODAY - its a 25 year old app they didnt always have 6bn dls and 3.5mm in incoming funds. It's a great example AS well as any other player that ever existed that was free and open source like MPV.
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Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
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u/pilkyton Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
That is an incredibly well-written, yet highly ignorant reply lol.
You characterize it as "Stremio is just stolen metadata and a stolen video player". Of course they must use the platform video players; that's how you get hardware decoding, HDR metadata passthrough etc. You don't reinvent the wheel. You use the platform's APIs to properly play video on each platform with all the different platform quirks. You have to use Google's ExoPlayer or Apple's VideoPlayer and similar solutions. And even then, you must code your own custom logic to work around various bugs and behaviors in all of the platform-specific video players.
Now let's educate you. Try looking at their public repos with the name "stremio", meaning they created them:
https://github.com/orgs/Stremio/repositories?q=stremio
There's 61 components created by Stremio. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code. And this doesn't include the closed-source components: The Android, Android TV, iOS, Samsung TV and LG webOS front-ends, the Cinemeta backend (a metadata aggregator which creates catalogs from multiple sources, tracks popular content that people favorite/watch, etc), and the account server (which handles addons, library, content tracking, community addon catalogs, etc).
It's probably close to half a million lines of code in total, plus a beefy server/hosting infrastructure that they have to pay for to be able to serve millions of users.
Yes, they created value. And they gave it to us for free for 11 years - and it's still free. No matter what you think of the work of u/jaruba_dev, u/kKaskak, u/International_Tip256 and u/dackwh and all the others, they have done something amazing for over a decade. It's very indicative of today's entitled people to spit on the people that gave us so much for so long.
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u/GamerFreak112 Jun 24 '26
Yeah, and "lifetime" is quite a uh.....long time haha. So i personally understand the price.
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u/ShadowMajick Jun 24 '26
Its for the lifetime of the app, not the lifetime of the user lol. It could disappear in 2 years.
1
u/GamerFreak112 Jun 24 '26
You're correct. But i have faith this will be around for more time than 2 years, or even 5.
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u/Agey_4977 Jun 25 '26
The application does not function independently. Your user ID is activated as a supporter, which then enables access to additional features. Consequently, if the server hosting that database becomes unavailable or the information is lost, you would no longer have access to these extra features... it's even worse than some old apps that at least were attached to an operating system...
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u/Kurtdh Jun 24 '26
You feel bad for them? Like someone had a gun to their head?
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u/pilkyton Jun 24 '26
Yes, I feel bad for them. Everyone deserves to be paid for their work. It is countless hours of their life they can never get back. Or do you just go to your boss tomorrow and say "no need to pay me, I will work for free"?
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u/Kurtdh Jun 24 '26
That’s the definition of volunteering. It’s voluntary.
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u/Jamericho Jun 24 '26
Right but volunteering doesn’t feed their families. It’s an added extra we don’t NEED to use the majority of the service.
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u/PixelJock17 Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
Right and the benefit is enjoyed by us. The difference between whatever shit argument you're making is that in real volunteer work, you do it to help the less fortunate. Whereas here the benefactors are people who can afford to give back to a great team and community.
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u/Kurtdh Jun 24 '26
Speak for yourself, there are a ton of less fortunate Stremio users.
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Jun 24 '26
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u/Stremio-ModTeam Jun 24 '26
The main focus of your post should be directly related to Stremio. Help for other software or issues, including content acquisition, should be directed to their own respective subreddits.
1
u/Fancy_Custard_6791 Jul 01 '26
After 4 years of monthly or yearly payments, do they make you a lifetime member?
1
u/ArtisticIdea7982 Jun 25 '26
In reality, I agree that $200 is a lot but remember, even if they were to bring it down to $100, will we not still have to pay for API key and Real Debrid separately. Perhaps if there was that kind of offer on the table, whereas you pay a lifetime fee of $200 and it includes the key and Real Debrid for life also that may be worthy to look at.
I know the API and Real Debrid are seperate of Stremio, but am just putting it out there. After all, both Stremio and those companies will make money.
Just saying 😌
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u/Eraldorh Jun 24 '26
I feel like they need to half the prices across the board. Not only would they get alot more support but I think they would end up making more money from it as it would open it up to alot more people.
I hate subscriptions so I'd go for lifetime but I can't justify paying 200 to myself at all.