I just don't understand why developers underprice their apps so much. You're talking about an app that people are constantly raving about, and that people use for multiple hours per day. Charge $5/month, that's half the price of Netflix or Disney+.
It seems like Reddit is pushing these changes because that's exactly what they want to happen. They want all users to be using the free first-party Reddit app.
Reddit is already nearly entirely astroturfed advertisements, and you pay for the site by reading the shill posts that fill its pages. The fact that anyone pays Apollo or Reddit for a subscription is already just sad. Like paying for cable.
Same with Twitter. So many businesses were built upon basically free API access and are now shocked the company responsible for their app's customer appeal wants some of that action.
It's not Reddit's responsibility to float OP's business and make it profitable. OP's billions of monthly requests have a real cost for Reddit - and now that Reddit's API is so coveted, they can charge whatever they want for it's access.
No Twitter - no Twitter App.
No Reddit - no Reddit App.
It's really simple...
$5 is not an insignificant amount to a lot of people all over the world, including Europe and maybe the US. Especially when every single app and service wants you to subscribe to them now, I've heard plenty of people saying they're going to cancel their Netflix subscription when password sharing stops working.
344 requests per day is not worth $5 per month for the average user.
For the average HN user? Lol, no it’s not.
I would wager the majority of HN users can point to several dumb >=$5 expenses in any given month. If you don’t value Apollo enough to pay for it, fine. Just don’t pretend that $60 a year is a morally outrageous amount for software.
Apple takes at least 15% of that, or 30% depending on the developer's revenue, leaving $2.55 or $2.10.
Reddit, Twitter et all don't owe you anything. They do not make money via read-access API calls - they lose money. It's super simple...
Only a fool would build a business around a free service with no escape plan.
Complaining you don't get free stuff anymore is really unbecoming of an entrepreneur.
Netflix has introduced ad-supported tiers where you pay less. That’s the same here, those users can use the website or first-party app.
Twitter eliminated 3rd party clients, and now Twitter is estimated to be worth 1/3 of its acquisition price.
Lastly - Twitter's market price has nothing to do with it's profitability. That seems obvious, but apparently needs to be said here.
They are just truly shitty at make a working app. It's really not a business or what, just the official one truly don't work.
Popup ad to notification is already bad, pretend it to be user message? How the fxxk do they think it is going to encourage the engagement?
Reddit even gives each user 100 API queries per minutes for free.
Why can't apps use that to access the data for each user?
When I go use an app that talks to OpenAI for example, it asks me to put in my API key. So why not just do that for third party reddit apps?
I think the app can just ask the user to OAuth with it and then it should be able to use that user's API access up to the free rate limits.
It's not profitable. That's why they're cutting to the bone and not even paying a lot of their bills.
They had to make an advertising exec the nominal CEO, because a lot of advertisers have fled the platform.
He wasn't complaining about that. He was led to believe that the price would be reasonable, and he was willing to pay a reasonable price, as he already pays Imgur.
It seems the OP has a very distorted impression of what "reasonable" means to another for-profit company.
According to Apollo's developer 80% of the users make less than 500 requests per day, so I'm guessing the proportion of power users making a lot of requests are in the single digits. I doubt enough of them want's to pay enough to subsidize the others.
There's also the point that using Reddit is a two way street. Reddit is made up of user created (or user stolen) content, and moderators are working for free. Reddit's whole value is made up of user interactions, allowing users to make those interactions is not just a cost.
Why should the app developer pay anything at all? The users are also Reddit's users, they authenticate and can use Reddit's resources in a number of ways, why not charge them directly? Will Reddit be sending a bill to Mozilla for my page loads?
Because Reddit makes money off the ads. They can't guarantee third parties will always show the ads in the way they've designed.
So now they are charging third parties the cost of losing ad views.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/27/tech/elon-musk-twitter-si...
Not all apps are worth $5/month, but this particular one that people apparently love enough to spend hours per day on certainly seems like it should be. A slightly nicer calculator app that you use twice a month? $0.99 is fine. A professional productivity app that saves a high-value worker hours of time? Way more than $5/month.
It's ok if not everyone can afford an app.
> Why should the app developer pay anything at all?
The app developer is just a proxy for the users, who are using Reddit without seeing any of Reddit's ads.
Only Reddit knows how much money it loses per user who doesn't see ads.
Prices are a two-way street. You can name any price you like, but if buyers can't afford it, then you make $0.
This is why the developer himself can't just raise his own prices by any arbitrary amount. Buyers have some say in the price.
And then Reddit would have to audit third party apps to ensure paying users are getting what they pay for. Sounds more onerous than just making third parties pay up.
Indeed, but this is the risk in selling a middleware product. The Apollo developer doesn't own the platform, and was lucky he hadn't yet been asked to pay for the share of maintenance costs his app created.
Depends on who you think an average HN user is.
It sounded like an OAuth'd user gets an individual allocation of free rate limited API queries (100 per minute).
I wouldn't call that Apollo app's author a fool. My understanding is they were turning a profit from the app up to now. So, apparently, it was a nice business. It's just that their business model is about to stop working.
Well, that happens to other business too sometimes. They'll have to adapt somehow or come up with another business. Life as usual.
According to the Apollo dev, the average user would cost $2.50/month in API fees. I imagine power users would be substantially more costly, so $5/month would not cover the API + apple tax for just themselves, let alone supporting the regular users.