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Comment by laweijfmvo | Hacker News Reader

> Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month

900,000 total users, if they were all converted to paid users, would cost $1.89 per user, so Apollo could charge $1.99 per month. Or they could charge $2.50 per month as stated above.

This seems reasonable for access to all of reddit and their engineers to maintain it for you?

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But they can't charge $2/mo. Not all of their users will pay. In fact, most won't, and many who would already paid for "lifetime membership" (Apollo Pro/Ultra) which they sold anywhere from $5-$50.

They'd probably have to charge $10-20/mo just to break even.

Only if paying users also had to pay for free users. They could charge $2-3/mo and make the app only available by subscription.

It sucks and I still think the developer(s?) would take a pay cut, but it seems like the only viable choice at this point.

70% of 2.50 is $1.75 which would put them under with current mobile app store pricing of a 30% fee for subscriptions. $3.75 gets them closer but then margin is $0.125 which would total to $112,500/yr if all 900,000 users switched to paid which is highly highly optimistic.

> reasonable for access to all of reddit

Not all of reddit. You're still blocked out of NSFW content (which will not be accessible over any tier of API).

Don't forget Apple's cut. And presumably Apollo devs don't want to work for free. And not everyone will pay. And, and, and ... soon you're charging 5, 6, 10 bucks a month.

According to calculations, His only pivot is to make it sub only for like 5$ a month. Remember 30% goes to Apple.

Since Apollo qualifies as a small/medium business, that's 15%

They need $20 million to break even on the api costs alone. Both Google and Apple charge 30% on revenue exceeding $1 million per year

I mean the people that make the content are users. The same people who use the app.

I think a big point in this change that people are ignoring is the restriction of explicit content, even to paying customers. As I understand it, anything labeled with the "NSFW" tag will only be available through the official app, even for paying customers.

Why should I have to pay when my de facto web browser is the apollo app versus the safari app? At the end of the day its just an app interfacing with a website in both cases, and regulating that in either way is inconsistent and stupid.

When you are in the web browser, Reddit makes money off you by serving you ads. With Apollo, they get nothing.

They make no money off me because those ads are blocked on my web browser just like they would be on a mobile app. It just seems like the same sort of thing to me when you boil down what the things are, but I can see why reddit wants to be punitive and capture most of the market. It sure sucks to see the site slide that way though.

Capture most of the market? What market? Apollo is using Reddit's servers to make the API calls, so how is blocking it "capturing the market". Sounds like Apollo should pay for their own server infrastructure and make their own Reddit instead of a passthrough app that generates 7 billion API requests a month LOL

> if they were all converted to paid users

There's your problem.

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