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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? > On

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."
  - websap 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - LorenPechtel 3y ago

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."
- websap 3y ago
  [flagged]
- LorenPechtel 3y ago