And the "hammering" is addressed and strongly countered in the article.
Maybe it's necessary, but that seems awfully tight timing. I have not reviewed any of the rest. My understanding is they tried to emulate push notifications...
$12.99 per year was priced with majority of the compute burden foisted upon Reddit. Apollo had servers too, but apparently took a lot of steps to minimize what they did in order to keep subscription prices super low.
$12.99 doesn't pay for an the free users that might not be hammering the API quite on the same level as the paid users, but hammered it non the less.
If the polling was the bulk of the traffic they could just remove that feature.
And there's no way the compute burden is an entire dollar to do 4000 requests.
Specifically, the $12.99/year model is floating a ton of free users, in addition to paying for server resource usage. None of that $12.99 currently was allocated to paying Reddit, and we know Apollo calculated an approximate cost of $2.50 per user per month with the new API fees.
This $2.50 fee seems to align costs with what we can reasonably expect Reddit to earn per user on their platform. Reddit prices Premium membership at $5.99 monthly, which among other benefits removes all ads. $5.99 likely indicates a $2-3 profit when all ads are removed but user engagement remains constant.
The typical mildly engaged Reddit users probably easily spends an hour a day looking at ads via the app - so while the math may be fuzzy, it seems like Reddit possibly based their API pricing off something like this.
At a minimum, that is $2.50 x 12 = $30 of cost annually per user. This means all users need to pay Apollo $30 a year to break even on just Reddit fees, or some subset of users needs to pay a lot more than $30 a year to float a bunch of free users. Apollo has other expenses too (labor, servers, etc.).
Even if the API fees were reduced 80% down to $0.50 per user per month, that's still $6 annually per user - and Apollo has a lot of free users.
All of this is to say, the $12.99/year membership for Apollo was never going to work with any API fees.
