$10/month to use a free website on your phone is just not a very attractive deal at the end of the day.
$2.50 would be the API costs per user. So $5 would cover, take in some money and pay appstore feeds. And if you're looking at 10% of his userbase, that would be about 4 million a month income with 2 million being for Reddit. Based off his claims of 20 million a month with a $2.50 cost per user.
I'm sure he'll be able to survive off $1,000,000 a month profit.
Edit corrected the numbers:
$2.50 a user for API costs.
$5.00 a month subscription would cover that cost.
$1.50 going to AppleTax.
$1.00 a user to the indie hacker
If 5% of users that would cost $20MM sign up for $5 a month it would be $2,000,000 a month overall revenue.
$1,000,000 to Reddit.
$600,000 to AppleTax
$400,000 a month to the indie hacker.
He says that he can charge more and still make a living. However, the price change goes into effect July 1st of this year. That’s less than 30 days from now.
The issue is all the current premium users who have 2-12mo left on their subscription suddenly become a huge liability. He cannot suddenly ask for more (against apple rules), and he must not remove features they paid for (apple will issue a refund to them).
And there is also probably a part of him that doesn't want to be greedy. But is it greedy to sell your software for $5 a month? I don't think so.
Dang, maybe there’s room to make a Reddit app, haha.