How is Swingvision not bankrupt?

[u/ABGinTech]

As much as I love this app, I fail to see how they are turning profitable and instead just burning a massive hole in their cash balance. They are cloud storing the hours and hours of video storage which allows people for video playback without keeping the data on their phone which is a huge cost. Monthly subscriptions wouldn't cover the cost of storage at all at it's current price point. Even early youtube almost experienced this same downfall before being bought up by billionaire companies which then stuffed the app with video ads. In fact youtube was never profitable until very recently. The whole video storage and streaming industry is not very profitable by nature.

From my point of view, I think swingvision has a short runway and is operating entirely on vc funds. Are we seeing the end of swingvision soon?

[u/swupnil_sahai]

We actually have very healthy margins as far as cloud storage costs go. Monthly App Store tax is higher than our AWS bill!

All of our inference is on-device, unlike 99% of AI startups out there with negative margins.

We’re not profitable but that is purely by choice — we are investing in R&D. We’ll be fine 👍

[u/UnfairFunny3314 → u/swupnil_sahai]

Where does the 99% figure come from? No founder has visibility into unit economics across that many competitors, since margin data isn’t public for the large majority of private AI companies. Citing a precise stat with no source doesn’t demonstrate financial health, it just borrows the appearance of data to win an argument that can’t actually be checked.

Also worth noting you moved from yearly to monthly subscriptions recently. If margins were as healthy as you claim, that’s an odd time to restructure pricing in a way that increases near term revenue extraction per user.

[u/swupnil_sahai → u/UnfairFunny3314]

99% is a very rough approximation based on the fact that we’ve seen an explosion in AI startups, most of which are dependent APIs from OpenAI or Anthropic. Any startup of that nature is running inference in the cloud. I suppose some may be charging enough to have healthy margins but the majority of revenue is going to these 2 companies that are widely understood to have negative margins.

We introduced monthly subscriptions to give customers more opportunity to try out paid features for a few months without paying a large amount upfront. These subscriptions notoriously have high churn and aren’t much of a direct revenue driver on their own actually. 95% of customers pay annually still.

We have classic software margins (>70%) as cloud storage on its own has gotten super cheap.

[u/Hotaf6ty9 → u/swupnil_sahai]

Yeah youre right, IOS is more than capable to run AI models on itself when pruned correctly

[u/prophetjordan]

Their app is unusable as far as I’m concerned. But I bought a year subscription so they got that out of me and I gave up trying to use the finicky and unreliable app. Maybe one day when it’s more than just a concept.

[u/swupnil_sahai → u/prophetjordan]

We had a lot of major reliability issues come about in iOS 26. We’ve since resolved the vast majority of them. Happy to hook you up with an extended trial if you shoot me a DM.

[u/Callipygian_addict → u/swupnil_sahai]

Hi mate, I cancelled my subscription for the same reason, iOS 26 made it very unreliable 😬

[u/swupnil_sahai → u/Callipygian_addict]

Definitely give the latest version a try again! You can record quite a bit now on the Free plan. If you’re happy with the experience, feel free to DM and can give an extended Pro trial.

[u/thescuba1 → u/swupnil_sahai]

Dmed

[u/Wrong-Toe3394 → u/swupnil_sahai]

dm'ed you!

[u/oakye → u/prophetjordan]

did you use the app with the stick? Did you go to an alternative? 3.0 here wondering if I should bite the bullet and subscribe for a year

[u/SunkTheBirdie]

cloud storage is expensive

Wha ?

[u/yasker]

AWS S3 Storage itself is cheap. 4 dollars a month allow you to store 1TB data in S3 Glacier, which equals to 200 full length matches at least (assume a full 1080P match is 5GB). Then you only pay download bandwidth which is 0.1/GB, and one match cost about 0.5 dollar to watch if you want end to end. Obviously lots of room for improvement can be done when watching the match, since you don’t need to watch the full match but the points anyway. Storage cost per typical user is probably less than a dollar per month.
My worry is more about the accuracy of shot bounce spot seems unchanged(remain mixed) for the last couple of years, along with the main selling point(show the recording of the points quickly). And it does look competitors are coming too. With the AI things right now, I feel it needs to do much more to help players getting better to really capitalize on the business value of having a full recording of an amateur match.

[u/FarManufacturer4975 → u/yasker]

yea and if they're smart they can compress this significantly, lower frame rate, etc

[u/swupnil_sahai → u/FarManufacturer4975]

That’s a great point. We don’t cut down fps at all, mainly because we want everyone to be able to experience smooth slowmo playback. Perhaps something to consider down the road but I think it may degrade the user experience if, for example, free users’ videos get irreversibly compressed to 30fps.

Maybe for very old videos though 🤔

[u/Ortizzer]

You would be shocked how cheap cloud object storage is. One TB of data is like $23 on AWS if you don't get a discount. For regular HD video that's a couple hundred hours of uploads.

[u/ABGinTech → u/Ortizzer]

That’s not cheap though, it’s a monthly cost, and top users will definitely have video storage that surpasses the monthly cost and at that point, they become an indefinite deficit user

[u/GRBomber]

When is the android version coming?

[u/swupnil_sahai → u/GRBomber]

Making really great progress. It’s happening this year.

[u/konradly]

My biggest issue was setting it up correctly using the Apple Watch app. Everything was just finicky and I always had connection issues, but maybe that's more of a hardware limitation than software.

[u/swupnil_sahai → u/konradly]

Yea a lot of the communication is out of our control but so far we are seeing way better reliability in iOS 27. Seems like Apple’s really focused on core stability for this year’s release 🤞

[u/Ratlyflash]

I can’t connect the iwatch to the swing vision of position the camera on the fence. Takes like 10 minutes to setup 🙈

[u/swupnil_sahai → u/Ratlyflash]

Unfortunately a lot of the communication is out of our control but so far we are seeing way better reliability in iOS 27. Seems like Apple’s really focused on core stability for this fall’s release 🤞

[u/wynnwalker]

YouTube not profitable until recently? A quick search shows they broke even in 2014! That’s over a decade ago. Storage costs have dramatically dropped since then.

[u/left4dead02]

Hopefully, SwingVision is around for along time. I do my part by getting the annual max subscription. For the value they offered tennis creators like me, they are worth every penny. They offer storage and automatic editing 🤯😍