Ask HN: Is anyone else confused about the business model of Screenpipe?

2 points

2 years ago

The app was on the front-page a few days ago. Today, I got an email stating that they just had a large investment. Curious, I checked out the pricing page to see how it makes money.

(I swear, this is not an ad, I'm not going through their "post us on social media" route, that just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)

    There are multiple ways to install screenpipe: [1]

    as a CLI for technical users (??? free?)
    as a paid desktop app with 1 year updates, priority support, and priority features (USD 205, becoming USD 332)
    as a free forever desktop app (but you need to build it yourself). We're 100% OSS. (free)
    get the desktop app 1 year license by sending a PR (example) or sharing about screenpipe online (paid via contribution [cool!] or by shilling [ick])
    as a Rust or WASM library - check this websocket to stream frames + OCR to your app (likely free)
    as a business (aight)

(Note that there's also bounties, which I thought was pretty cool.)

So apparently it's... USD 205?! The price is going up significantly too, up to USD 332, intended to induce FOMO. (This also leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)

Apparently, you could also get it free, albeit without priority support, if you build it yourself.

But it's MIT-licensed, and thus supposedly libre, right? So there's nothing stopping a trusted community member, or package managers such as Chocolatey, from just redistributing the binary. This used to be how Aesprite worked, before they changed to a non-libre license to prevent people from doing that. Luckily, it seems like Screenpipe has no CLA, so changing licenses in this way doesn't seem likely.

So in general... this is all very confusing, but from what I've understood, there is no reason why people can't just redistribute the binaries for free, it's just that someone hasn't done it yet. So the USD 332 just gets you 1 year of priority support.

(Which also means that, yes, don't buy it now during the "sale". It'll drop to USD 0 soon, if you just care about getting the binaries.)

Sorry for the inflammatory text, I just find these business practices really shady, especially for a project that advertises itself using open source. The confusion and "FOMO sale" [2] is mildly bad, but the "get our app by posting us on Reddit ten times" part is awful.

[1] https://github.com/mediar-ai/screenpipe

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20241001013505/https://screenpi.pe/onboarding

1 comment

There are multiple ways to install screenpipe: [1] as a CLI for technical users (??? free?) as a paid desktop app with 1 year updates, priority support, and priority features (USD 205, becoming USD 332) as a free forever desktop app (but you need to build it yourself). We're 100% OSS. (free) get the desktop app 1 year license by sending a PR (example) or sharing about screenpipe online (paid via contribution [cool!] or by shilling [ick]) as a Rust or WASM library - check this websocket to stream frames + OCR to your app (likely free) as a business (aight)