Comment by fckgw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fckgw | Hacker News Reader

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Apollo had a yearly subscription while switching over to the new Reddit API structure would require a monthly fee. That puts you in a spot where you may have users that are still on a yearly plan and not paying in while incurring massive monthly API costs. It was the sudden short notice of API costs increases that caused the whole thing to collapse

"One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That's $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.

So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users."

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

Refund at a pro-rated rate, be frank with users and tell them the situation and why you have to raise prices - then raise prices.

I doubt users would have revolted had the subscription gone up to $19.95 or even $29.95 a year. Heck, my hiking app is more than that annually, and I barely use it.

I remain convinced Apollo had options, but the creator was convinced it was an impossible situation. It was not. There was an outpouring of support and people willing to spend money on an app they saw immense personal value in.

> Refund at a pro-rated rate, be frank with users and tell them the situation and why you have to raise prices - then raise prices.

I don't think the app store provides a mechanism to do this.

So refund in full and do the rest? That's what happened anyway, isn't it (the refund)?

The point was there were options, but the creator didn't seek them. So many people wanted that app to continue living - I find it impossible to believe the creator couldn't get an extra $1 a month (or even a lot more!) from those users.

How many apps can boast they have 50,000 paying customers? People need to appreciate just how difficult of an accomplishment that already is. The paying users loved the app, and would have paid more to continue using it - especially in light of the available information at the time.

A massive proportion of us didn't request a refund. I don't know the percentage, but I would not be surprised is most users didn't ask for a refund of $10.

You're probably right that there was some way for Christian to navigate this and keep Apollo up. But I also don't blame him one bit for throwing his hands up after how that whole API debacle went down. Must've been pretty stressful.

I believe Apollo was open sourced after it's demise. You could run it yourself but then you'd have to contend with the intentionally difficulty of installing software on the iphone.

> I doubt users would have revolted had the subscription gone up

I don't doubt this, actually. I was a user of Apollo. I purchased the Pro Unlock for $5, and I did this only because it was a 1 time purchase. If it were a $5/mo subscription, I would have never used the app. Sure, I'm just one person and maybe many others don't feel the same way, but I have a hunch many do. Especially with the amount of subscriptions flying around these days, many people are getting frustrated by constantly having to subscribe.

Even if 80% of users stopped using Apollo, the rest could have still been sustainable and/or profitable.

50,000 paying users. That's incredible. Apollo could have even gotten loans to cover the interim if needed. There were many options to continue forward. The creator took none of them.

My guess is the creator was emotionally exhausted by the ordeal and was not in the head-space to deal with such a disruptive change. Unfortunately, brilliant creators/engineers are not always the best suited to operate the business, especially during troubled times.

Reddit designed this pricing change specifically to kill off 3rd party apps. If Apollo jumped through this hoop, there would be another in the future. There wouldn't be any winning this game.

Maybe, maybe not. It's unreasonable to expect a company to offer free services that make you money. Therefore it's not unreasonable to pay something for access to the content that makes your app successful.

No matter what the API fees are - if Apollo provided value to it's users, it would have users willing to pay for it. Like I previously said - many apps cost $30-50+ annually to use - and the users are happy to pay. Apollo users probably on-average used the app daily.

Are there any 3rd party apps that did not come to the same conclusion that the fees and restrictions made their continued development untenable?

Narwhal transitioned to a 3rd party, paid subscription app. It's been around for over a year in this form.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/29/23777992/reddit-third-par...

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