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Folks - if you want Apollo to survive, go make it known you are willing to pay $5 a month for access. I know it's popular to hate on Reddit right now - and for

by Alupis 3y ago

Folks - if you want Apollo to survive, go make it known you are willing to pay $5 a month for access. 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.

mynameisvlad 3y ago
Did you read the thread? It includes a section about increasing the cost and how it wouldn't really do much. > 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.
- Alupis 3y ago
  Apollo made business decisions, that turned out to be very short sighted. Apollo sold access to someone else's system, for next to nothing, and now is caught having to pay for that access like any reasonable business would expect. 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.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    I'm not really sure what benefit you get out of harping on a developer you will likely never meet or interact with in a third party forum, but power to you. 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."
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garbagecoder 3y ago
It would be a cheap shot for me to just say "you didn't read the post, did you?" but he does explain it. 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.
- Alupis 3y ago
  Sometimes, in the real world, and especially with business - you must swallow your pride to survive another day. 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...
  - garbagecoder 3y ago
    No, no you don't. In business relationships are critical. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably one of the people you don't want to do business with. There's a name for people who will do anything for money and those are usually one off transactions. You've had a month of everyone telling this guy he's dumb to trust a 3rd party with your platform and now the 2cynical4u people are saying shut up and be a whore. You're just being an unconstructive critic. And you have no evidence it's temporary.
  - WeylandYutani 3y ago
    Nah nobody's going to pay for Reddit. Monetisation of social networks only works via ads/tracking.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      The amount of Reddit Gold that's thrown around seems to disagree...
Dylan16807 3y ago
Right now, I would only pay for a subscription if there was a way for reddit to get none of the money.
- mulmen 3y ago
  I can understand that position in this case but really the idea of passing the cost along to provide a high quality experience seems nice. Like imagine a third party YouTube client where you pay the UI developer to make a UI that doesn't urinate in your breakfast cereal. You get a better experience and they show you the YouTube catalog. Now imagine the same app has access to HBO and Disney and Netflix. I could see paying a premium for that because it separates the platform's incentives from the UI incentives, which removes the dark pattern incentives like promoting the platform's own content.
websap 3y ago
Seems stupid to reward Reddit's decision. The $5 ends up in Reddit's pocket. I'd much rather fund a decentralized competitor to Reddit.
- Alupis 3y ago
  > I'd much rather fund a decentralized competitor to Reddit 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...
  - websap 3y ago
    I can't change the world, but I can control my individual actions. I'll be deleting my Reddit account by the end of the month. Reddit is basically unusable for me from all their default surfaces: 1. Mobile website has large banners to download the app. 2. Mobile app is confusing as shit and tries to mimic TikTok 3. Desktop browsing experience is probably one of the worst apps. I've been using old.reddit and RES to keep it somewhat useable.
  - wasmitnetzen 3y ago
    Or, this will be Reddit's Digg moment, and the masses will move on from an increasingly user-hostile platform, onto the next new shiny thing, for another cycle.
swid 3y ago
The post details how yearly subscriptions is one of the major issues, not monthly ones. There is already an update to monthly prices from 1.99 to 5.99, but the people on the yearly subscription locked in 0.99 or something like that. 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.
pierat 3y ago
Do you know what happens when you pay blackmail or protection money? It keeps happening, and at more cost each iteration. 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.

by Alupis 3y ago

mynameisvlad 3y ago

Did you read the thread? It includes a section about increasing the cost and how it wouldn't really do much. > 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.

Alupis 3y ago
Apollo made business decisions, that turned out to be very short sighted. Apollo sold access to someone else's system, for next to nothing, and now is caught having to pay for that access like any reasonable business would expect. 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.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  I'm not really sure what benefit you get out of harping on a developer you will likely never meet or interact with in a third party forum, but power to you. 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."

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garbagecoder 3y ago

It would be a cheap shot for me to just say "you didn't read the post, did you?" but he does explain it. 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.

Alupis 3y ago
Sometimes, in the real world, and especially with business - you must swallow your pride to survive another day. 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...
- garbagecoder 3y ago
  No, no you don't. In business relationships are critical. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably one of the people you don't want to do business with. There's a name for people who will do anything for money and those are usually one off transactions. You've had a month of everyone telling this guy he's dumb to trust a 3rd party with your platform and now the 2cynical4u people are saying shut up and be a whore. You're just being an unconstructive critic. And you have no evidence it's temporary.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  Nah nobody's going to pay for Reddit. Monetisation of social networks only works via ads/tracking.
  - Alupis 3y ago
    The amount of Reddit Gold that's thrown around seems to disagree...

Dylan16807 3y ago

Right now, I would only pay for a subscription if there was a way for reddit to get none of the money.

mulmen 3y ago
I can understand that position in this case but really the idea of passing the cost along to provide a high quality experience seems nice. Like imagine a third party YouTube client where you pay the UI developer to make a UI that doesn't urinate in your breakfast cereal. You get a better experience and they show you the YouTube catalog. Now imagine the same app has access to HBO and Disney and Netflix. I could see paying a premium for that because it separates the platform's incentives from the UI incentives, which removes the dark pattern incentives like promoting the platform's own content.

websap 3y ago

Seems stupid to reward Reddit's decision. The $5 ends up in Reddit's pocket. I'd much rather fund a decentralized competitor to Reddit.

Alupis 3y ago
> I'd much rather fund a decentralized competitor to Reddit 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...
- websap 3y ago
  I can't change the world, but I can control my individual actions. I'll be deleting my Reddit account by the end of the month. Reddit is basically unusable for me from all their default surfaces: 1. Mobile website has large banners to download the app. 2. Mobile app is confusing as shit and tries to mimic TikTok 3. Desktop browsing experience is probably one of the worst apps. I've been using old.reddit and RES to keep it somewhat useable.
- wasmitnetzen 3y ago
  Or, this will be Reddit's Digg moment, and the masses will move on from an increasingly user-hostile platform, onto the next new shiny thing, for another cycle.

swid 3y ago

The post details how yearly subscriptions is one of the major issues, not monthly ones. There is already an update to monthly prices from 1.99 to 5.99, but the people on the yearly subscription locked in 0.99 or something like that. 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.

pierat 3y ago

Do you know what happens when you pay blackmail or protection money? It keeps happening, and at more cost each iteration. 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.