zlacker

Is it so unreasonable to charge 12k for 50mln requests? I don't know.

Is it so unreasonable to charge 20m/year to a super popular iOS app? I don't know.

Does apollo make money from this? Do they take advertisement income? But I imagine, if you are the most popular app, on the most popular mobile platform, of a very popular site like Reddit, there has to be a lot of money floating around no? They definitely have income, and definitely have expenses (development isn't free). Curious to actually see the balance of these.

But if reddit want people to use their own app, I don't see why they would support Apollo for free. I also don't know that the actual cost towards reddit would be. A reasonable price is probably somehwere between 0 and 12k.

>>dacryn+(OP)
That's not how the deal works though.

The deal with WWW is as follows:

You provide a website on the server. The client downloads it and decides how to render it. An API is going to be more efficient than HTML plus all the bells and whistles. But if you don't provide a reasonable API we go back to the stone age of HTML clients which parse and scrape. It is going to be more nuisance for client and server. Load is more intense and it requires more bandwidth at the cost of user engagement. And you'll get barely more advertising income.

The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.

>>Fnoord+M
We are at this inflection point where it is becoming practical to defeat any captcha services and extract information by screenshots with the help of AI. It is going to be a losing battle for the gatekeepers, as coming up with all the defenses and serving it is going to cost them more than keeping the API open. I hope they lose everything so future platform controllers won't repeat this mistake.

>>Fnoord+M
> The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.

This feels the most fair to me honestly. Using RiF subverts reddit income by not showing ads. So just let me the user pay a bit to use third party apps. Considering how much time I spend on it a couple bucks should be reasonable.

>>Fnoord+M
> The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.

I'd be willing to shell out the bucks for Reddit Premium if that would let me keep using Apollo.

>>dacryn+(OP)
Apollo charges a fat subscription for their app so the reality is that they’re just mad they’re losing their income.

The numbers they posted suggest they could still easily be in profit with these charges, they just wouldn’t be making 20m profit.

>>MagicM+Bn
The majority of Apollo users I reckon are using the free app. The paid app ("Pro") is what I use, but I do not use the subscription ("Ultra").

https://apolloapp.io/pro-ultra/

>>MagicM+Bn
Apollo is free to use. There’s a one-time fee for some frills like choice of app icon to show on the Home Screen and subscription for features that cost money and require maintenance of a server (notifications mainly), but they’re both optional. So many of its users aren’t paying anything currently.

The subscription currently costs $0.99/month or $10/year. With the new API pricing, he’d have to pay around $2.50-$5 per month per user. This means not only would the subscription have to become non-optional, but that he’d probably have to bump its price to $5/mo to just have API and server costs covered. Factor in super heavy users, the App Store cut, and a bit of margin to live off of and you’re looking at $7-$10/mo.

A few users will pay this much but I’d bet that most will not. It’s as much as a streaming service costs for a free service. The user falloff would be immense, and this is exactly Reddit’s goal: they want to herd users into its official app and site where they can be subjected to ads, data harvesting, algorithmic feeds, and incessant A/B testing to juice “engagement”. Whether that happens by way of third party app devs throwing in the towel or from users being priced out of using them matters not.