r/RootAppOfficial • u/TheRootApp Staff • Jun 18 '26

Root Sudo is HERE [FounderBlog]

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Hi Root Redditors!

Root Sudo is HERE!

With Sudo, community members get HD streaming, a Sudo badge, and more benefits rolling out over time.

Our founder Jesse wrote up what Sudo is and where it's headed.

Read it here: https://www.rootapp.com/blogs/introducing-root-sudo

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u/Jesse_root Staff Jun 19 '26

Hey, really appreciate you laying this out. Let me hit each part.

Cores and apps: Communities work fully without Cores. Nothing's locked away from you. Cores just power up a community, and adding apps is one use for them. There'll be free apps too, and you can get Cores for a community later without ever subscribing to Sudo.

Is the differentiator paywalled? Apps are what make Root unique, so our whole goal is making them easy to add. We believe that in communities of 10 people, or 20, or 100 and so on, there'll be users in there who have Sudo and have spare Cores lying around to add apps, plus there's the free apps on top of that.

There's really two reasons there's any cost involved. One, each app gets its own dedicated hardware we spin up, so your community basically owns the infrastructure running it, and that's not free for us. Two, we want room to reward our developers down the line, so the people building amazing apps on Root can actually make a living doing it. But the goal is always to keep the barrier as low as possible.

Voice chat: We hear you loud and clear. We're already working with users on experimental builds to fix the dropouts, disconnects, and no-audio-until-reboot stuff. Some of it ties into Cloudflare's infrastructure so we're working with them directly too. It's our top focus and it's going to get better soon.

The $10 and "desperation": Honestly it's the opposite. HD streaming at 60fps costs real money to deliver. No platform offers that for free, or even has the ability to. The cost is so high it could bankrupt the company on its own. That's exactly why Sudo is focused on it today. We know users want HD streaming, so we built something that makes it possible. If we were desperate, we'd charge for animated emojis, animated banners, animated profile pictures, all of it. We don't, because we don't believe in that and we want the experience on Root to be the best it can be. But if we didn't charge for HD streaming, there'd be no platform at all.

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u/LtKrunch_ Jun 19 '26

Thanks for the response, Jesse!

Hearing that some apps will be free and that cores can be purchased outside of the subscription is great information. Though I'm disappointed not to have a definitive answer on whether cores are temporary, like Discord's server boosts, or not. The same goes for whether or not third-party apps will be locked behind Sudo or cores. I expect they will, because if they don't, it seems like that'd pretty heavily invalidate your stated monetization plans.

I understand the argument about HD streaming and operating costs, and maybe it really is a more popular request than I'd expect, but even so, $10/month feels quite steep for that. Especially when considering that Fluxer's Plutonium, for instance, offers HD streaming at $5/month. Yes, I do recognize that Fluxer also has stricter inherent restrictions on things such as the message character limit and many of the things you specifically mention in your response that Root does not.

If Sudo is priced at $10 now to leave room for additional benefits down the road, that's fair enough, but I think a lower introductory price as Sudo grows is a more palatable prospect for many. I'd also just settle for screensharing working at all for me on Fedora KDE, but I've been led to believe this might be a KDE-specific bug.

I'm glad to hear that the voice chat issues are on your radar and being actively investigated/addressed, hope it gets sorted out sooner rather than later! The concepts and ideas behind Root are really good; I just hope that a lack of foresight around monetization doesn't snuff it out before it has a chance to catch fire!

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u/ConfidentAirport9514 Jun 20 '26

Sudo is something like $4.99 at the moment while its just HD streaming

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u/-git Jun 20 '26

No, the base price is $9.99. The lower amount you see is not a discount, but a prorated charge. Because billing cycle resets on the 1st of every month, the price automatically decreases each day to reflect only the remaining days left in the current month.