I know it's popular to hate on Reddit right now - and for good reasons, but folks, Apollo made a business decision that was unsustainable and entirely dependent on the good will of another (untrustworthy) 3rd party company.
It seems foolish to just shut down out of spite. The support for Apollo seems very strong - how about you all put your money where your support is and support Apollo?
How can we claim Apollo was so critical and necessary and everyone loves it - yet nobody wants to pay for a high quality app? This doesn't seem possible.
> Why not just increase the price of Apollo?
> 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.
> I hope you can recognize how that's an enormous amount of money to suddenly start incurring with 30 days notice. Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even.
> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.
We can debate if the API fees are reasonable or not - but at the end of the day, Apollo chose a model that doesn't work unless Reddit continued to favor them and apps like them. Foolish, is one word that comes to mind.
Given the popularity of Apollo, and the public outcry over the news it will be shutting down - I see zero reason Apollo couldn't switch to a monthly billing model - even if it requires refunding old subscriptions which they are already going to do.
This is a self-made disaster for Apollo, a failure to be forward thinking and control risks.
The founder started Apollo as a university project - but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.
Nobody really cares about your opinion on him or a monthly subscription; he explicitly said it's not going to happen and at the end of the day that's his decision to make, not yours.
He doesn't even need to give a reason for shutting down. It's his personal project to manage and he's the only one who's ever worked on it.
It's also clear you haven't read the article, because he explicitly calls out a bunch of criticisms you have of him directly.
> Isn't this your fault for building a service reliant on someone else?
> To a certain extent, yes. However, I was assured this year by Reddit not even that long ago that no changes were planned to be made to the API Apollo uses, and I've made decisions about how to monetize my business based on what Reddit has said.
> > January 26, 2023 Reddit: "So I would expect no change, certainly not in the short to medium term. And we're talking like order of years."
> Another portion of the call:
> > January 26, 2023 Reddit: "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. Me: "Fair enough." Reddit: "And if we do touch it, we're going to be improving it in some way."
> Your initial post in April sounded quite optimistic. Are you dumb?
> In hindsight, kinda yeah. Many of the other developers and folks I talked to were much less optimistic than I was, but I legitimately had great interactions with Reddit for many years prior to last week (they were kind, communicative, gave me heads up of changes), so when they said they were aiming to have pricing that would be fair and based in reality, I honestly believed them. That was foolish of me in hindsight, and maybe could have had a different outcome if I was more aggressive in the beginning. Sorry. /canadian
> (And to be clear, they did indeed say this. They used the word "substantive" and I wanted to make sure we had the same definition of something "having a firm basis in reality and therefore important, meaningful, or considerable")
> > Reddit: "That's exactly right. And I think, thankfully, the word is exactly the right one. It's going to have a firm basis in reality. I also just looked it up. We're going to try to be as transparent as we can."
Reddit could simply treat them reasonably and things would be fine. There's no need for favoritism, they just need to stop being actively harmful. And part of that is the fees (they're not reasonable).
He probably could, but not in 30 days.
> but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.
Or chose not to.
If they came out with a reasonable set of conditions to do API access, people would be a lot less upset. But they didn't. And those API fees are guaranteed to go only up, up, and further up.
Time to get out of reddit when the gettin's good.
Spite is how humans enforce social norms. In this case, they lied to him, slandered him with easily falsifiable things they even admitted he didn't say.
The relationship is broken.
Shutting down a popular business because things got temporarily inconvenient is immature at best.
HN, alone, is filled with people willing to pay $5 a month. He doesn't need to find new subscribers, he already has them! He's just not asking them for what he needs to continue operating.
That's entirely on Apollo...
You're just being an unconstructive critic.
And you have no evidence it's temporary.
Monetisation of social networks only works via ads/tracking.
The 30 day window was not enough time to rectify that and would cost him 50k in the first month to cover the diff. The author suggested he needed at least 3 months to implement changes and switch at least some portion of yearly subscribers to a higher price.
Right - and in 10 years everyone will still be using Reddit, Apollo will just be a distant memory, and nobody will give any thought to the API pricing model.
Just reality...
