In some cases, TheTVDB will charge money for use

The popular film data service TheTVDB will charge money for its use. The service collects metadata about films and series and could always be used as a free add-on, but will cost money if developers pass on the costs for API use to users.

TheTVDB has made some changes in a new api version, it writes in an email to users. This shows that in some cases costs are charged for the software, which could be used as an add-on for services such as Kodi or Plex. Until now, TheTVDB’s revenue model has been that companies had to pay for an API key. The license fee was always based on how often the api was called and how big the company was.

With api version v4, companies can agree to pass on those costs to the end user. “Several companies do not want to buy off the API access, and have asked us to pass the costs on to users,” writes TheTVDB. “We have chosen this approach to keep the service accessible to everyone.” Users have to pay for projects they have subscribed to that use the TheTVDB API.

Users have to take out a subscription of twelve dollars per year for this. This gives them access to all the services that pass on the API costs at once – so they don’t have to pay for every new project. With a subscription, users will also no longer see advertisements.

TheTVDB says in a statement that the advertising model is necessary to keep the service running. Ads are said to make only 10 percent of the revenue, and user donations only make a few hundred dollars per month. According to TheTVDB, users make billions of API calls per month, sometimes using more than a petabyte of bandwidth. That is why the service would pay tens of thousands of euros in hosting costs every month. TheTVDB would have taken other measures to reduce costs, for example by applying compression to the images and making the api content render not dynamically but statically, but that would not be enough.