I saw Kieran make a post about the "streaming pirates" and said he might have to disable free streaming. Then after a couple of days in the zap stream discord group, they pushed a message saying they changed the rates of streaming but didn't explain why free streaming is gone.

This past month I saw all kinda of streams left on zap stream, or nothing streams. Not sure if that was because of free streaming but all those streams are gone now. Zap stream seems much cleaner now.

I setup my own zap stream backend today and it was quite easy except my Wallet of Satoshi address and BTCPay server lighting address didn't work because of lud-21 which I didn't understand.I had to use someone's random alby address, which worked, eventually I will run a zap stream backend when they allow other lightning wallets but I won't keep it free.

Yes it's hard to onboard new users without free services, but it cleans up bad actors, depends on your goals.

I do think the zap stream interface doesn't show the cheapest stream price or is too hidden in the UI so users get confused. I believe if that was fixed it would be better. I remember your app showed it which is good.

I also worked on my test script and and I was able to extract both prices plans, making it easier for users to understand and see the prices.

Zap Stream should have a nostr profile giving others updates who don't have discord, but the discord link is on zap stream top right profile icon.