zlacker

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+(OP)
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+(OP)
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.