Why would they?
In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed.
A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
I feel terrible for Christian on an individual level. He must be going through hell. However, there is a business being run by Apollo and it needs to be held to it's commitments.
> A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.
That's practically the definition of tortious interference.
https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/liability-and-insuranc...
"The most common form of [tortious interference], however, occurs when an individual forces or induces someone to break a contract they have with a third party. This can happen in many ways: someone could offer below market prices to induce a breach, they could blackmail or threaten someone into violating a contract, or they could make it impossible for the other person to perform and receive the benefits of that contract - by refusing to transport goods, for instance."
"By way of illustration:
If a landlord promises the tenant that he will not exercise his right to terminate a lease, and relying upon that promise the tenant spends money improving the premises, the doctrine of promissory estoppel may prevent the landlord from exercising a right to terminate, even though his promise might not otherwise have been legally binding as a contract. The landlord is precluded from asserting a specific right."
Generally speaking the law doesn't care whether or not you personally think it applies, merely that you've broken it.
There's nothing obviously improper about a site replacing a free API with a paid API even if it causes problems for those who relied on the API being free.
Reddit did not force or induce Apollo to break a contract with its own customers. Apollo unilaterally chose to do that because it could not afford continued access to Reddit's APIs, which Reddit was not under a legal obligation to continue providing at historical rates that Apollo had based its entire product around, despite long-standing advice not to do so.
"I didn't refuse to transport your goods, I just said it would cost a billion dollars per pound to do it and you couldn't afford it" is not the gotcha that you think it is. The law is technical but it's enforced by humans.
It's straightforward: Apollo and Reddit have a longstanding business relationship, via these APIs that Reddit has provided for a long time at zero cost. Reddit generally no longer wants third parties to use the API, so they are increasing the price to a level that they know will cause everyone to balk (other third-party clients are closing up too) so that they can direct that traffic to their own native client and first-party sites, while knowing that Apollo has these long-standing business relationships of their own that are built on this relationship with Reddit.
In short, reddit is deliberately taking action to sabotage and cause economic harm to a business partner by changing aspects of the relationship that make it impossible for the partner to fulfill their contracts to third parties, so that Reddit can direct that business to themselves instead.
That is an improper taking under tortious interference, and the rest of the tests (intent actual economic loss - not just refunds but future income, etc) are trivially satisfied here.
I know people are libertarians here but the right to swing your fist ends at someone else's face, and legally speaking if you take actions that you know will result in a business partner being forced to sustain economic losses due to your improper breaking of your business relationship with them, you are generally liable for that damage you cause to the partner. That is the basic concept of tortious interference, you're paying for the damage you caused to your business partner. Swing your fist and hit someone's face and you get to pay for the surgery.
(IANAL and Reddit's lawyers would obviously say their conduct is proper, but, generally this is the type of situation where people can unexpectedly get themselves into legitimate legal trouble based on actions they think are perfectly legitimate. And generally they may have been legitimate if you didn't have this prior relationship, that changes things! It's different to not build an API at all, vs having the API be free and have third parties start selling clients and then to stop doing the API.)
(As a sibling comment notes, estoppel is another - if you promise something to someone, even a verbal promise, and they take a financially detrimental action on the expectation that you will follow through on your side of the promise and you don't, then you are generally liable for the financial harm you have caused them too. Libertarianism doesn't mean you can wiggle out of contracts, even verbal ones.)
Did I miss something? I downloaded and used Apollo for free for a time, then later bought Pro for like $5 a couple years back. There is/was a subscription tier, Ultra, which for a time had a lifetime option, but it was never a particularly necessary expense and I have always enjoyed Apollo without it.
I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing.
I don't know how monthly subscriptions work, but yearly subscription refunds are pro-rated.
> I'm surprised more people don't do one-time purchases to avoid these subscription refund stories I keep hearing
I'm not, at least not for apps like this that need consistent revenue to support regular maintenance and/or server costs in an era where customers balk when an app costs more than a few dollars. To achieve this you end up balancing whether or not to serve ads, hope you can just grow enough new users forever, charge for major updates, charge a subscription, or beg for tips. While there are some exceptions, you can probably tell that ads or subscriptions are generally winning this nowadays.
One-time purchases are a tricky thing, since you've realisitcally now precluded ever charging for a major update. This is great for them, and might be for you if you've gotten your math right, but if you haven't (or it changes) then you're stuck. And, for better or for worse, they tend to be the loudest users.
Marco Arment talks about this balance in general on an episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast a couple weeks ago when discussing how Casey (another host) should price an app he's writing. For context if folks aren't aware, Marco created Overcast, which is a popular 3rd party iOS podcast app. The discussion spans a couple episodes but I the post-show of [Episode 535](https://atp.fm/535) captures the gist.
I do kinda wonder. IANAL, but based on these comments I imagine there could be a case?
> Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years." > "There's not gonna be any change on it. There's no plans to, there's no plans to touch it right now in 2023.
At least for the yearly subscriptions
Very different tone from when the Twitter client developers were complaining that no one could possibly have foreseen a situation where they couldn’t deliver on services they’d happily taken money for upfront.
Edit: This was an honest question in response to the parent comment about Twitter clients. What's with the downvotes?
Yet for some reason, the Twitter client devs (who had happily shifted all their users to a subscription-only model) all of a sudden realized that they had sold a bunch of one year subs they had sold were going to be useless as soon as Twitter turned off the API and, more pertinent to their pocketbooks, all those customers would be entitled to request and receive a refund through the App Store for their now non-functional app. The devs started whining to their customers about being “small businesses” and having the food snatched out of their families’ mouths and why would anyone be so cruel as to seek a refund?
Christian is showing a hell of a lot more integrity and toughness than the Twitter client authors.
Or am i misunderstanding how much money there is in this space?
If he isn't "10+ million"-wealthy that's extremely disappointing for all solo devs out there in my eyes.
But there's a lot about this story that I don't understand:
* How can the Apollo guy be perceived as "threatening" Reddit? He has no leverage.
* Why does he suggest that they buy his app for $10m, when they can just terminate his API access at a cost of $0 - "I have altered the deal; pray that I do not alter it any further"
Because according to Reddit, the problem with Apollo is the opportunity cost of Reddit not being able to monetize its users.
Acquiring Apollo is user acquisition. Destroying the app does not necessarily mean that all those users will now start using Reddit's official app and become monetizable, they might just quit Reddit entirely. By acquiring Apollo Reddit could monetize those users through Apollo instead of the official Reddit app.
