Most “where to watch” sites tell you where a movie is right now. We tell you where it's about to be — usually weeks before the rental price drops to zero.
Every major studio has a streaming home it consistently routes its films to. Disney sends its theatrical releases to Disney+ in around 45 days. Warner Bros. lands on Max on a similar timeline. Sony, which doesn't own a streamer, sells output to Netflix on a ~120-day cycle. Universal splits between Peacock and Netflix. Apple holds for Apple TV+. These windows aren't guesses — they're the recurring patterns we see across thousands of historical transitions.
Wait or Watch takes a film's studio, its theatrical date, and anything we've observed about its current availability (rental price, first-seen rental date, price drops) and produces a prediction: which service it's likely to land on free, and roughly when.
Every verdict carries a confidence level: high, medium, or speculative. High confidence means we have a strong sample of historical releases for the same studio–service pair. Medium means the pattern exists but the studio sometimes deviates. Speculative means we're extrapolating from limited data and you should weigh that accordingly.
When a film's rental price drops by 50% or more in 30 days, that's a strong real-world signal that streaming is imminent — the prediction tightens automatically.
Those sites are excellent at the question “where can I watch this today?” We're built around a different question: “when can I watch this without paying extra?” The prediction is the product. Everything else on the site — departure dates, leaving-soon alerts, the price history charts — exists to make the prediction more useful.
On the web, we don't know which services you pay for, so we show the best-case prediction across all of them. Soon we'll be able to tailor verdicts to the services you actually subscribe to and ping you the moment a prediction comes true.