Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Infstream – We’re trying to fix video monetization for creators
TL;DR: https://infstream.com/?code=HN Hi HN – we’re Ben & Callum from Infstream. We’ve always been heavy users of YouTube, for entertainment, education and sharing. Towards the end of last year, we saw more and more horror stories of YouTubers losing their livelihood to the ad algorithm. We decided to build a content-first video platform, which aims to reduce issues by removing advertisers from the equation. Instead, we charge for the content you watch – bold, I know. Instead of paying in advertising and data, users on Infstream build their own streaming package, a channel at…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Infstream – We’re trying to fix video monetization for creators launched in 2020; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1VM
2020 · infstream.com · its alternatives →
- 2SelfStream▲48
SelfServe Instream Video Monetisation
2025 · selfstream.adpushup.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Why monetizing content on the internet is so hard
2015 · serve.castfire.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Hey HN, I've been working on this side project for the past month. It generates a step-by-step tutorial guide for YouTube videos that you can follow along without watching long videos. Best suited for tutorial videos but can work for other videos aswell. No BS. Just straight to the point. The guides are generated from pure transcript so you don't have to worry about it being AI. It's my first project as a total beginner. Something I had to do inorder to get out of tutorial hell. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or if you face any problems or bugs. I would try to fix them to the…
2024 · stepify.tech · its alternatives →
- 5
Overlead▲146Here's the problem: I launched two products. I wrote blog posts. I posted on X, built in public. I tried running ads. And you know what actually got me customers? Replying to someone on Reddit who asked, "What's the best tool for this?" One reply. Three signups. I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. But here's the issue: I don't have time to refresh Reddit all day looking for these posts. I have products to build. Bugs to fix. Emails to answer. Life to live. So I built Overlead to do the searching for me. Overlead scans Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News (and many more to come) for…
Feb 2026 · overlead.co · its alternatives →
- 6
VoteVid▲106Hey, I am Victor, a french student. I was tired of getting really bad recommandations from the algorithm, always the same videos, same topics. So I created a community-driven recommandation tool, with upvotes like Product Hunt or Hacker News. Looking for something to watch or want to share something you liked? Feel free to check the site, it's free, no account needed (unless you want to share or upvote a video).
Nov 2025 · votevid.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Hey HN!! Many of us enjoyed the "If YouTube had actual channels" Show HN post last week. As developers of a similar project, we wanted to share our approach to building a simulated live experience. We’ve spent around 18 months working on this and have managed to add some advanced features, including content-based interactivity. We are super excited to be releasing both the live stream and the code behind it. Our idea was to combine the communal watching experience of television with the modern trappings of the interactive web. If you go to the stream, you will be watching along with everyone…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
- 9IM
Just wanted to share with you something I built. If you’re a creator or someone who financially supports creators, this will be of interest to you. Qufro.com is a site where creators can monetise their fan interactions. It works this way: A creator sets an amount for answering fan questions. A fan posts a question or a comment and is only charged if the creator responds. From the fan’s perspective, we’re solving the following problem: Not all fans want to commit to a monthly subscription (e.g., on Patreon) to support their favourite creators. With Patreon, ko-fi, etc., there is also no…
2023 · qufro.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Read an article yesterday about the H.264 codec increasing their licensing fee by an astronomical amount. And as always, my first shot was how hard could it be to try and build a codec which could be that efficient. I've personally been on a drive to improve my ability to one-shot complex features, products, or make even surgical changes. It's been a few months since I've been doing that, and honestly, results have been great for both work and work/life balance. This was a fun experiment. It burned through tokens, but it helped me identify some more improvements I could make to my…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Google couldn't buy twitch, so they made it themselves.
2015 · youtube.com · its alternatives →
- 12
1 live stream = 10+ extra pieces of video content
2021 · its alternatives →
- 13TE
I have been running some experiments on twitch.tv along the lines of driving traffic to websites via donations. Many streamers will read a message attached to a donation of a certain amount of money on stream in front of all their viewers. Sometimes they will visit a url if that happens to be in the content of the message. On rare occasions they will even share the url with the rest of the stream. I would consider my most recent experiment a success. I follow and watch a few streamers on twitch that play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Three of the streamers I watch recently created a…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 14FT
Over the past year I uploaded a bunch of videos to my personal channel. Most of them were short documentaries, news-style edits, or content covering current events and war. A lot of it ended up getting demonetized, age-restricted, or removed completely, usually without any clear reason or explanation. The worst part was not knowing what caused it. You upload something, it seems fine for a while, and then it disappears or gets buried. I spent days editing videos that ended up dead in the water because of things I couldn’t see coming. I started building a tool to help with this. Just something…
2025 · frametwo.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Been in the AI image gen space since 2023, before even GPT image gen was a thing, and after spending ~9K on Facebook ads for my own projects (made a video about that actually) I realized the thing I kept getting stuck on was the creatives themselves. I'm horrible at making reels-type video ads and Canva even with templates is surprisingly complicated for ad-specific stuff, plus everything ends up looking the same as everyone else using the same templates. Made a video going into detail about the full FB ads journey if anyone's interested:…
Mar 2026 · admakeai.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hi there HN! I'm Matthias and I've been into video streaming for quite a while now. Over the years I've built plenty of small setups, often CLI tools to test and debug streaming video. About a month ago, during my annual holiday, I started working on a simple API on top of my CLI tools. It's time consuming to craft and run multiple ffmpeg jobs, get GOP / keyframes right, merge playlists, package to HLS, ... One thing led to another and I eventually started exploring HLS interstitials, VMAP / VAST and dynamic ad insertion, MSE / EME (HLS.js in general), React (perf) as a player…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17IP
Hi HN, I’m Ashu, founder of VideoDB. I’ve spent a big chunk of my life building video infrastructure. Not video creation. Video plumbing. The stuff you only learn after production breaks: timebases, VFR, keyframes, audio sync drift, container quirks, partial uploads, live streams, retries, backpressure, codecs, ffmpeg flags, cost blowups, and “why is this clip unseekable on one player but fine on another”. This week we shared VideoDB Skills, a skill pack that lets AI agents call those infra primitives directly, instead of you wiring pipelines with screenshots plus FFmpeg glue. Repo:…
Mar 2026 · its alternatives →
- 18
React.tv▲7Hi HN! I am excited to share the project I have been working on for the last nine months called React.tv. The original problem I was attempting to solve is "Ethical React Content" on the internet. If you are confused, react content is when a content creator watches media and puts their image and commentary over the media being watched. The current solution to these reaction videos is good faith attribution, where the content creator puts a link to the video being watched in their description in hopes that the audience will click it. This is not ideal, and when done on a livestream with…
2025 · react.tv · its alternatives →
- 19SH
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JtFBkrFNYWk https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z3oZwV78m-c https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Gqta_wJILuE (and so on)
2022 · its alternatives →
- 20
Upvote.Team▲12Built this to solve the cold start problem for side projects. You browse/support posts from other creators across platforms (LinkedIn, Medium, Instagram, etc.), earn 1 credit to promote yours. Free, no ads budget needed. Just launched today – curious what HN thinks about the model.
Nov 2025 · upvote.team · its alternatives →
- 21MA
Hi there, So a buddy a couple of days ago came up with the idea for a new SaaS product regarding gpt and image generation. We did a quick MVP that barely works, it breaks almost 50% of the time but we still wanted to validate the idea before going all in. We have almost 1k followers on Twitter together. Did a quick post describing the idea with a stripe link in the comments with a 5$ value, no landing page, and no shipped product. In exchange, the buyers become beta users. Around 30 mins later we got our first sale next 30 mins another 5$ and so on. Do we consider the idea validated? The…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 22IB
I built this as a Garage Project over the weekend. https://x402.backpac.xyz/ Still working on refining things, but let me know your thoughts. Cheers.
2025 · its alternatives →
- 23IB
YouTube is full of quality content but it is sometimes hard to find it so I created a website where you can rate and review channels and that helps you discover new ones. The goal is to make a platform like IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes but for YouTube channels. I want to go the opposite direction to YouTube which for instance removed the dislikes on videos and has limited search capabilities. For now there are not so many channels but users can submit new YouTubers instantly. I offer you different new ways to discover content on the website: Detailed filters (topic, avg duration, type of video,…
2024 · favoree.io · its alternatives →
- 24WV
Hey everyone, my friend and I created a GitHub Wrapped video for developers to showcase their activity on the platform in a more fun way. The implementation is open-source (https://github.com/rendleyhq/github-wrapped-2024) if you're interested in how it was built. To get a bit geeky, we used masks, keyframe animations, luma key shaders to remove the background from the confetti video, and some other techniques. Also, everything is rendered directly in the browser!! I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the rendering performance, especially if you're running this on your…
2024 · rendley.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →