Show HN: We made a way to earn subscriptions by having your computer turned on

[tannerg]

With the recent explosion of streaming services, paying for the variety of monthly subscriptions is becoming a costly burden. Because of this, we made a desktop app that passively earns users money towards digital subscriptions based on how much data they serve on our peer-to-peer video content delivery network.

We created this because we realized large corporations are taking user data to run targeted ads without compensating them. With our project, we hope that users will be able to pay for internet content using their extra computer processing power instead of their personal data.

Note that this is a pre-alpha version of our product but please check it out and let us know what you think! Also note, that in future versions we will provide a power user feature with more data on the amount of CPU and bandwidth our application is using in order to provide even more transparency and control to the user.

[protocontrol]

Just discovered this product. It seems one should have a subscription to something but isn't clear to what? it's YouTube? It's Amazon? Is this some VPN-like desktop app?

[tannerg]

Hey, protocontrol, our app provides subscriptions to Spotify, a Twitch channel of your choice, or Wired Magazine. We are a peer-to-peer CDN that pays our users for helping to distribute third-party video data.

[oriettaxx]

mmmh, is it open source? how would somebody trust this without, at least, an open source repo?

[tannerg]

We are not open source, however, we hope that through the pre-alpha that users can try our product out a bit. I know that users still need to take that initial leap of faith in that what we are saying is the truth regarding our peer-to-peer CDN and desktop app, but I think that initial level of trust is required to adopt any small non-open source technology that has been released before it has grown to be larger and more recognized in the market.

[oriettaxx]

can't you open source it? why not?