I‘m curious as well, as for so many countries ingesting and matching that catalogue including error correction is currently a full time job for more than a dozen people over 6 years and 10k+ per month in infrastructure costs.
Will check for canary traps tomorrow as I‘m suspecting they‘re just scraping us or our competitors. This is far too expensive to build for how cheap they‘re selling it.
Regarding your suspicion, surely this is not the first time someone making a smaller-scale, more humble and cheaper version of a future that some established companies already have.
There are two reasons for prices to be cheap:
First one is that I'm a solo developer who has been working on this for a couple of years now (I've launched the website in 2017, and since 2019 I've been working on to add streaming availability information). As I don't have a dozen people working on this but only me, it's only natural that my expenses are less than an established company.
Second one is that when I decided to add streaming availability information to my website back in 2019, all the available APIs were either: 1-not available for small developers like me, 2-too limited (like Netflix-only APIs), 3-too expensive for my student budget (as I was still a university student at that time). Due to that situation I was in, one of my aims from the start was to make this essential data available to small developers/teams/blog sites.
Will check for canary traps tomorrow as I‘m suspecting they‘re just scraping us or our competitors. This is far too expensive to build for how cheap they‘re selling it.
Source: I work at JustWatch.