How Streamplace Works: User-first and developer-first at the same time

The first thing people ask you when you’re running a startup: are you targeting users or developers? Streamplace’s thesis is that LLMs and vibe coding make that distinction harmful. Successful products will be user-first and developer-first at the same time1. User-first applications like Reddit and X deny vibe coders the access they need to build next-generation transformative experiences that we haven’t even imagined yet. Developer-first companies might seem poised to capitalize on this trend, but the traditional SaaS model leads to siloed, isolated experiences. The products that win in the LLM world will be equally compelling to users and developers in a virtuous cycle.

User-first products miss out on the post-LLM universe. There’s an unbelievable number of creative, smart, motivated people who never quite made the jump to software development before LLMs. Those people are now shipping multiple apps a week. Reddit and X, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen now as the time to restrict their APIs and cull their vibrant ecosystems of third-party clients. We’ll spend the next five years watching them slowly decline while holding on white-knuckled to their network effects: it’s the only thing they’ll have left. The rest of us will have moved on to platforms and applications that better align with our values.

Developer-first products are siloed and lonely. Early on, it will look like developer platforms will be the real winners here. Cloudflare and Vercel will put up big numbers. However, most of the vibe coded apps will never see any users. With 10x the apps in the world, converting new users is 10x as difficult. The developer platforms will just be cutting into their margins. As they begin to recognize this, expect the SaaS companies to start to clamp down on their free tiers, desperately trying to get their users paying even $5/month.

Streamplace’s approach breaks down the walls between applications. Our base primitive: decentralized public broadcast. Our users, video creators, are first-class citizens of the ecosystem, not some abstraction held in one of our customers’ databases. When the new generation of programmers ship their apps, they can have users on Day 1, not be begging for people to create yet another account with an email and password. As for us: we’re building a customer base at every step of this process, not shipping some SaaS and idly standing by hoping one of our users turns out to be a unicorn.

This is where decentralized social protocols are helpful. After Streamplace broadcast AtmosphereConf 2026, we kicked off VOD JAM and allowed anyone from the community to build an app or website for watching the recordings. We averaged two app integrations a day, and every app shipped immediately has 60 hours of content. A “user-first” product would resent the competition. A “developer-first” product would make every app into its own empty silo, waiting for user signups and uploads. Only by building products for both creators and developers can you thrive in the new world.

In this context, you win by being the right answer for everybody at every step. A coach wants to broadcast a high school football game on the school’s website. What’s the easiest way? The Streamplace app. The booster club does a fundraiser? Streamplace facilitates the payment. Coach’s team goes to state and they need to scale out the stream a bit? Streamplace subsidizes the broadcast with ads. Coach decides to vibe code an app over the summer; Claude gets them started with the Streamplace SDK in ten lines of code. Now Coach’s app is the biggest high school football app in the country, broadcasting thousands of games a week, and they never considered using anything else. Meanwhile, all the other schools are busy embedding Coach’s stream in their apps and websites. And the cycle continues.

So what’s the playbook? You want:

Maximum Proliferation: We see one success condition for LLM age: When the user asks Claude, Codex, or Gemini “How do I add video to my app?” The answer must be “Streamplace”. We get there by being easy, cheap, open-source, globally-scaled, and ubiquitous. There must be no downside or risk of vendor lock-in.

Don’t ship APIs, ship primitives: Streamplace’s signed segmentation format works equally well whether you’re streaming video over the internet, archiving it on a NAS, or teaching an LLM to create a supercut with fifty other videos. Amazon IVS has expensive solutions for 60% of your video needs. Streamplace has them all for free.

Generous free tiers: In Streamplace’s case: free multistreaming, free archival, and (eventually) free ad-subsidized distribution. Become the obvious first step for creators’ livestreams, even if they’re still mostly using Twitch and YouTube. You afford this by leveraging alternative and decentralized infrastructure instead of building everything on AWS and Oracle cloud. Bittorrent and Iroh scale really well.

Scale for those who need it: For the 1% of vibe coded apps that really start to hit, Streamplace is your one-stop shop for solving all the hard problems: ad-free distribution, storage, chat. For the 1% of most successful streamers, we provide archive, analytics, and custom app development services. Or, for power users, bring your own S3-compatible API; we integrate with everything seamlessly.

Align with creators at every step: Start by becoming a useful, low-friction addition to creators' workflow. Build a desktop app to help them manage their libraries. Then help them out at every step of the journey: give them tools to monetize for private videos, remix their streams with others, and embed their stream wherever it's needed.

Once upon a time, users and developers were separate markets. That distinction will becomes less and less meaningful every year that goes by. Streamplace will be right there with them, helping power the next thousand years of social video.

This phrasing is borrowed from an excellent treatise by Leaflet creator @schlage.town that I hope he publishes someday!