We got tired of the scroll too.

Filmatic started as a complaint. You finish work, you want a film, and forty minutes later you have watched three trailers, read two synopses and gone to bed. The catalogue is enormous and none of it is aimed at you specifically.

That is not an accident. A streaming service's recommendation engine has two jobs: help you find something, and keep you inside the app watching things it already paid for. Those goals agree less often than you would hope. When they conflict, the second one wins — it is the one attached to the licensing bill.

What we built instead

Filmatic has no catalogue to defend. It doesn't own the rights to anything, it isn't paid to promote anything, and it doesn't care which service you end up on. That makes it free to do the one job: work out what you like and hand you something worth your evening.

The mechanism is deliberately simple. You swipe — liked, seen, save, skip. Each swipe updates a model of your taste. Similarity between films is computed from the text about the films themselves, so the system understands that two films share a preoccupation even when no genre tag says so. Your taste profile is built from your own swipes and never leaves our database.

No ads. No paid placement. No studio can buy a slot in your recommendations, because there is no slot to sell.

Who is building it

It's a small operation. That's the reason support replies come from a person rather than a ticketing system, and the reason the roadmap moves in whatever direction seems most useful that month.

What we won't do

• Sell your taste data. It is the most personal thing here and it is not for sale. See the privacy policy, which says so in the language a regulator would hold us to.
• Take money for placement. The moment a film appears because someone paid, the whole thing is worthless.
• Make it hard to leave. Export everything, delete everything, from inside the app in two taps. Here is how.
• Pretend to be bigger than we are. You will not find invented user counts or testimonials on this site. When there are real numbers worth quoting, we will quote them.

Get in touch

Bugs, feature requests and general opinions to [email protected]. Press and partnerships to [email protected]. Anything about your data to [email protected], which is monitored separately because those requests have legal deadlines.

There is also a contact form, if you prefer.