Apollo is shutting down because the founder thinks they'll incur about $2.50 per month of costs per user, and apparently doesn't believe enough people will be willing to pay $5 monthly to keep Apollo running.
So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.
He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app. Now he's put into a position to support those customers at $2.50/month. (He estimates their server cost is $0.10 per month.) That's an instant $125,000 per month out of his own pocket that he can't recoup from existing customers for at least the next 6 months.
Over the course of 2023, he'll have to pay Reddit $1 million MORE than he has made from the app this year.
Reddit doesn't want to work with third-party apps. That's fine. That's their right. But it's certainly not the app developer's fault that he's forced to quit.
This sentiment is obviously false. Reddit doesn't want to support third-party apps at Reddit's own expense. That is reasonable.
> He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app
And now we get to the issue. This was never a sustainable business model. It depended on Reddit API being free - even at the massive volume Apollo operates at. That is unreasonable.
I take him at his word that he was willing to pay a reasonable amount.
Again, Reddit has the right to run their business however they wish. Not arguing that it should be free.
Christian has already shared his correspondence on Reddit with this. He pretty clearly sought and received regular assurances that when and if Reddit moved their API to a paid model that it would be at a reasonable cost and with a flexible timeline to accommodate third party apps.
After telling him no such big moves were happening in 2023 they changed their mind, set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.
What does this even mean? "Reasonable" is subjective - and from Reddit's perspective, I'd bet they believe the fees are reasonable.
It's on the business operator to mitigate risk. Apollo didn't do that - and is now throwing in the towel instead of charging their customer's more.
> set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.
Apollo has had since April to figure out a new billing model - but sat on their hands hoping whatever Reddit came up with could be afforded with their existing $10 per year per user model. Say it out loud - it's absurd.
Just stop.
You’ve been told multiple times, by multiple people, that this was not the case.
You’ve been provided the timeline, which you refuse to acknowledge.
You very well know that he was not provided the pricing until 8 days ago.
At this point, you continuing to say this is just being disingenuous and talking in bad faith.
What, exactly, are you getting out of this? Is unreasonably placing the blame on a single developer your way of getting your rocks off?
You may want to believe and be sympathetic toward Apollo - fine.
That doesn't change the circumstances nor realities. Apollo screwed up, and is now throwing in the towel. It's really hard to be sympathetic towards a business operator that's made a series of bad choices and now is playing the victim card and shutting down.
You’re the only one who is finding it hard, and your constant push to shift the blame off of a massive corporation and onto a developer is frankly weird.
Re-evaluate your life choices if you truly believe this, but it’s clear you are the extreme minority here.
> So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.
If you read the post, it's not just about the willingness of users to pay. It's also about the existing obligations (prepaid subscriptions), the timeline of the changes, and the amount of work that would be required on his end to adapt to the new changes within the next three weeks.
None of that would be an issue with the proposed solution of Reddit charging the users directly.
He could fire up a new system with appropriate pricing as soon as he can manage. All customers, if they want to come back, are then forced into the new system at new pricing levels. Maybe this takes a month or two or three. He's not losing money in the mean time and can re-open at something resembling a profitable stance when he can do so.
Yes, it sucks. But there's a path here if he wants to go for it. I don't blame him for throwing in the towel. He's tired of getting yanked around. I would be very hesitant to keep throwing good time(money) after bad.
There is no chance I'm paying for a "service" where power-mods will ban you for disagreeing with their radical politics, where most of the subreddits are actively taken over by similar power mods who push their radical ideologies, and where any attempts to evade this stuff and simply use the website can get you permanently banned from the service.
Imagine spotify, but if you listen to the wrong songs, you get banned from other random artists, and if you try to work around this you just get banned outright from spotify.
No thanks.
Good call out. It's like the business equivalent of:
You changed the rules of the game because you didn't like how I played. So I'm not even going to bother playing with the new rules. I retire.
The rules of the game changed so severely that playing the game isn't just disagreeable, it's impossible.
What would you have done instead?
Charge $5 monthly and refund the annual fee for those who want it (which is already being done it seems, regardless of Apollo's future).
Apollo has options. They're just choosing to shutdown. That's the founder's prerogative, of course, but it is totally unnecessary.
Look at the support in this thread alone - Apollo has tons of people willing to throw money at them.