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If you want to avoid cable-like prices for streaming TV, the best way is to aggressively cycle through different subscriptions. A new app called StreamWolf makes that process simpler. StreamWolf provides an overview of all your streaming subscriptions, shows you the total cost, and lets you cancel (or reactivate) individual services with just a button tap. It also offers some watchlist features so you can plan what to pay for at any given time. The app is still a work in progress, but it shows promise and offers some utility even in its early stages. It’s the kind of service that streaming platforms like Roku and Fire TV ought to provide themselves, but won’t. How it works StreamWolf is available for both iPhone and Android. While its creators may eventually charge a fee for its subscription management features (more on that below), the app is currently free to use. After launching the app and creating an account, you’ll be prompted to sign into all your streaming services. StreamWolf doesn’t collect any streaming passwords; it’s merely opening an in-app browser where you log into each service’s website. Jared Newman / Foundry Once you’re logged in, StreamWolf scans the contents of each streaming account page, so it can understand what plan you have and how much it costs. The app then displays the total cost of all your subscriptions, both annually and monthly. The real magic happens when you ask StreamWolf to cancel one of your subscriptions. Instead of just dropping you onto an account page, the app uses some automated browsing tools to handle the cancellation process by itself. This allowed me to cancel (and restart) my Netflix subscription just by tapping a button. Once your subscriptions are connected, StreamWolf provides a centralized way to turn them on or off.Jared Newman / Foundry StreamWolf currently works with Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount+, and YouTube. Impressively, it will also recognize add-on subscriptions with those services, such as Amazon’s Prime Channels, YouTube’s Primetime Channels, and Disney’s various bundles. It properly noted, for instance, that my Disney+ subscription is in a bundle with Hulu. While StreamWolf isn’t the only app for managing your streaming subscriptions, I haven’t been impressed with any others. Some require manually inputting subscription details, so they’re barely more functional than a spreadsheet. Others gather that data automatically by connecting to your credit card and bank accounts, which feels overly invasive. (Rocket Money, notably, can share your financial data with advertisers.) By contrast, StreamWolf is focused entirely on streaming, keeps track of your spending without gathering sensitive financial data, and automates the tedium of managing your subscriptions. It’s filling a clear need as the cost of having too many streaming services gets closer to a typical cable bill. What’s not working yet As I mentioned earlier, StreamWolf is far from perfect. While playing around with it this week, I ran into several technical issues and noticed a bunch of ways that the app could be better. The biggest problem is that it didn’t accurately sum up my subscription spending. It lists my Disney+ and Hulu bundle at $11 per month, not the $5 per month Black Friday price I’m paying (or the regular price of $13 per month, for that matter). It’s also overestimating my monthly streaming bill by $34, apparently because it’s counting a couple of expired Amazon Prime add-ons. StreamWolf’s “Discover” section is a bit undercooked as well. You can add movies and shows to a watchlist, but navigation feels slow, and when I added “The Boys” via the search menu, it failed to appear in my watchlist. StreamWolf’s Discover section lets you keep track of what to watch.Jared Newman / Foundry StreamWolf might eventually use your watchlist to suggest the best times to pay for each service; but for now, the payoff of maintaining yet another watchlist isn’t worth the effort. (If the app synced your streaming activity via Younify, like Trakt is doing, that’d be pretty compelling.) StreamWolf could also use support for managing more streaming services. Notable omissions as of now include Apple TV+, Fubo, DirecTV, AMC+, and Starz. What’s next for StreamWolf StreamWolf is the first startup from James Harris and Steve Lewis, a pair of childhood friends from England who got fed up with manually cycling through all their TV subscriptions. They teamed up with Ron Downey, a U.K.-based streaming executive, who now serves as the company’s CEO. (The company is building a team in Columbus, Ohio, where Harris now lives.) In an interview, Harris and Lewis said they plan to eventually charge $3 per month for most StreamWolf features, but for now they’re focused on gathering feedback and improving the app. They also didn’t rule out keeping the app free and making money in other ways, such as through sales commissions when users re-subscribe to a service. Beyond just making the app more reliable, they’re also planning to bring live sports into the watchlist section. This could help users figure out what they need for the teams or leagues they follow—an increasingly complex calculation as sports rights become scattered across different services. If streaming platforms like Roku and Fire TV were actually on your side, they’d offer this kind of service themselves. Instead, they’re more interested in upselling you on extra subscriptions than helping manage what you already have. If StreamWolf can keep streamlining the process of cycling through subscriptions, it’ll be valuable countermeasure against runaway streaming costs. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice. Read...

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TechHive Editors Choice At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Hugely versatile Compact and unobtrusive New, intuitive functions like twist offer analog-like controls Cons Integration setups can be a bear Swipe function is rocky at best Somewhat expensive Our Verdict With more than 20 trigger possibilities, the broadly compatible Flic Duo is a tremendously versatile and useful control-anything smart home controller. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Flic Duo Retailer Price Check Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices Flic’s smart button is a tiny device with a powerful concept, a platform-agnostic gadget that literally gives you a button that can be placed anywhere for easy, tactile control of all types of smart home devices. The all-new Flic Duo, reviewed here, builds considerably on what that original gadget can do, moving from three functions to a whopping 22. It’s a significant expansion of capabilities, although getting everything set up within the Flic ecosystem remains an endeavor that smart home novices might find challenging. Specifications Like the original Flic Button, the Flic Duo is so small it might easily be misplaced—or even consumed by an rambunctious pet. Measuring 2 x 1.25 inches overall–and roughly 1/3 of an inch thick–it’s designed to be used in the hand or mounted to the wall—or both. A magnetic back means you can slap it onto a metal backing plate (sold separately, $10) or affix it to any metal surface for a semi-permanent setup while also allowing you to remove it as needed. The Flic system can control devices across scads of third-party ecosystems, the major ones being Matter, Alexa, IFTTT, and SmartThings. As the name suggests, the Duo has two buttons instead of one, billed simply as “Big Button” and “Small Button” respectively. As with the standard Flic Button, you can assign tasks to each of these buttons with single-push, double-push, or push-and-hold triggers. Unique to this new model are hold-and-swipe and hold-and-twist triggers, both of which I’ll get to in a bit. The Bluetooth-enabled Flic Duo will work with or without a Flic Hub (either the basic, single-band-Wi-Fi Hub Mini, $30; or the dual-band-Wi-Fi Hub LR, which adds infrared blaster and ethernet ports, and Apple Home support. It costs $90.) But the Flic Duo is less capable if you choose instead to pair it directly to your phone. The Flic Duo is about the height of a stack of four quarters, and not much bigger in overall size, either.Christopher Null/Foundry A phone-centric approach isn’t ideal, as it makes the Flic Duo useless if your phone isn’t in Bluetooth range; and some features, including the twist function, don’t work at all without a hub. Either Flic Hub will do the grunt work of pushing the Flic Duo’s commands to the internet or to local smart home devices as needed. I tested the Flic Duo with a Hub Mini. However you choose to pair it, the Flic system can control devices across scads of third-party ecosystems, the major ones being Matter, Alexa, IFTTT, and SmartThings. It can also control Philips Hue, LIFX, Ikea, and Nanoleaf devices directly without an intermediary, and it can work as a remote for Chromecast and Sonos. Integration with Google Home is handled via Matter or IFTTT. A complete list of integrations can be found here. Installation and setup I’d encourage buyers to use the Flic Duo the way I tested it, in concert with either the Flic Hub Mini, shown here, or the more robust Flic Hub LR.Christopher Null/Foundry Setting up the Flic Duo is fairly painless. Presuming you’re using a Hub, the Flic app will automatically discover the Hub once it is plugged in, asking for the password printed on its backside and configuring basic Wi-Fi settings. With the Hub connected, you can now pair it with the Duo, which is a similar, albeit password-free process. It’s a quick and easy process; the much more daunting part of the experience comes next, when it’s time to set up your integrations. Using the Flic Duo Flic hasn’t changed much about the way its integration setup system works, and despite the promise that “new partners are continuously being added,” I didn’t see much of a change from the list available last year, although I’ll admit it’s impossible to keep track of every single option of the dozens available (including the “fart generator,” which is now called “fart sound”). Configuring these integrations hasn’t changed, and the process remains complex at best. For example, to set up an Alexa integration, you must add the Flic skill to Alexa, then return to the Flic app and select the desired trigger you want to set up. Next, it’s back to the Alexa app to create a routine (or use an existing one), where you assign the Flic trigger you just selected to that routine. Alexa does most of the heavy lifting, and Flic just serves as a middleman. Flic’s exhaustive list of integrations can be daunting to sift through.Christopher Null/Foundry Things like controlling lighting directly with LIFX or Philips Hue devices is more straightforward, as the Flic app can discover the lights you have set up in those apps and control them directly. Still, you need to have a strong grasp on smart home fundamentals for this to be intuitive. The real advantage of the Flic Duo comes when you take advantage of the new triggers available, including those swipe and twist functions I mentioned previously. With these, you hold down a button then swipe in one of four directions; this can be helpful for cycling through music tracks or toggling an on/off state (swipe up for on, down for off, for example). The problem is that Flic’s version of a swipe is very tough to pull off successfully. Rather than just pushing the button and moving your thumb in one direction, I found you had to kind of jerk the entire device in that direction while also sliding your thumb across it at the same time. The Flic Duo’s “twist” feature gives new life to analog-like actions such as dimming and volume control.Christopher Null/Foundry So, push the button, slide upwards while simultaneously lifting your wrist, and then let go. Rarely could I perform this successfully on a single try, often leaving me maniacally waving the Duo around to try to get a command to go through. The twist function is even more interesting. Here you press a button, then rotate your wrist left or right. “Twist” is probably a misnomer for this motion, but I found it worked a lot more effectively than the swipe function, without any trial and error at all. Twist can be used to intuitively control volume or the brightness of lights, and I found it great for dynamically cycling through color lighting options on a lamp, too. Unlike the swipe feature, twisting worked seamlessly every time I tried it. Should you buy the Flic Duo? The Flic Duo is the even more powerful big brother to the original Flic Button, and it’s also arguably more useful (albeit also less intuitive to program and use) than the Flic Twist. It’s not a device for smart home novices, who I expect will quickly become lost in the complex machinations required to set up even basic integrations. More advanced users, on the other hand, will likely find it incredibly useful—even if you find you need to build a cheat sheet to keep track of the dozens of integrations you end up creating. It’s not perfect, of course: The swipe function needs a lot of work, stickers to label the Flic buttons still cost extra ($10 pack for the Flic Duo), documentation is basically nonexistent, and certain promised features like a “find my Flic” function in the app are still pending for 2026. It’s also expensive: $59 compared to $35 for a single Flic Button. All that said, if you’re willing to invest a little time, energy, and patience, there’s almost no smart home environment where the Flic Duo won’t be useful. Read...

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