Questions and known limits
What shroom needs, and what it doesn't do yet
Questions
- What does it cost?Nothing to us: there's no account with us and no subscription. Your videos live in your own Cloudflare account, and Cloudflare charges for storage only. At normal quality, about three hours of video fits in Cloudflare's free tier. Beyond that it's about 5 cents per hour of video per month. Delete old videos and the bill goes down. Cloudflare doesn't charge for people watching.
- Why does Cloudflare ask for a credit card?It's Cloudflare's rule for turning on storage, even on the free tier. You enter it on Cloudflare's own page; shroom never sees it. Within the free tier you aren't charged.
- What do I need?A Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 14 or newer, and a Cloudflare account (setup walks you through making one; if you already use Cloudflare for other things, a separate free account just for shroom keeps them apart). Your teammates need only the Mac: they join with your invite, with no Cloudflare account, no card and no setup.
- How long does setup take?About ten minutes, once.
- Is the install line safe?You can read it first: shroom.am/install opens as readable source. It downloads shroom from its GitHub releases and checks the file's fingerprint. It then checks the app is signed by shroom's own release certificate, and if anything doesn't match, nothing is installed. It puts the app in your home folder's Applications, with no admin password. shroom isn't notarized by Apple: the signature check above is what proves it's ours. Prefer Homebrew?
brew install --cask bagrat/shroom/shroom - Who can see my videos?Anyone you send the link to. Links are unlisted, not secret: the address is long and random, and search engines are told not to index it. There are no passwords or expiry dates yet.
- What does shroom know about me?Nothing. The app talks only to your Cloudflare account, plus GitHub to check for updates; an update downloads by way of this website, which counts it. There's no telemetry and no account with us. The website counts visits without cookies and without anything that identifies you.
- What happens to my videos if shroom disappears?They keep playing. The pages and the player run in your own Cloudflare account, not ours.
- How do I remove someone from my team?Settings → Members → Remove. They can't record to your space anymore, though a video already on its way has up to an hour to finish. Their videos stay in your space.
- Can viewers download a video?Yes, as a single MP4 file, from the player page.
- Can I embed a video?Yes. Links unfurl with a preview picture and a short clip in apps that support it, and there's an embed version for web pages.
- How do I uninstall it?Run the install line with
--uninstall. Your videos and links stay in your Cloudflare account.
What it doesn't do yet
- View counts on a video's page.Coming soon
- Deleting a video from its page — for now, from the Library on your Mac.Coming soon
Also not yet
- Windows, Linux and Intel Macs.
- Recording a single window or part of the screen (it records a whole display, or your camera).
- Comments and reactions.
- Passwords or expiry dates on links, or your own domain for them.
- Signing in with Google or a company account (SSO); removing a member is done by hand.
- On Cloudflare's free plan, your videos can be watched a few thousand times a day in total (for five-minute videos), far more when viewers use Chrome. Past that, they pause until the next day. Cloudflare's $5/month plan lifts the limit.
If one of these is what stops you, tell us: an issue on GitHub, or hi@shroom.am.