Yes, it's very reasonable, especially when you consider how many hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, these third-party client apps like Apollo have been raking in each year, for so many years. It's only fair that Reddit prices their API to get the lion's share of that revenue, regardless of whatever sob stories these wealthy app developers are trying to manipulate the angry mob with.
If people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to use third-party clients, doesn't that suggest that the first-party experience is awful?
Let's not forget that Reddit's content is generated by its users. Perhaps a significant number of these users wouldn't be on Reddit in the first place if not for apps like Apollo.
Dear god, bitter much? Who cares how much they are making? Apollo was $13/year (years ago it was $9/year). That absurdly low for the value Apollo provided. It provided a living for ~1-1.5+ developers/others (backend dev has a day job IIRC). They had server costs and various other costs (backend, icon art work, etc). If we were talking about a manipulative/scummy app it would be different but Apollo was top of the line. One of the best/better apps I’ve used on iOS.
If anyone deserved to be “wealthy” then it was this dev for the time and effort he put into the app. Even so, can you not see how it’s untenable to pay for the API even he wanted to? At rough estimates he was making $650,00 a year (~50K yearly subs IIRC). That’s 552,500 after apple’s tax, and then he has to pay the backend developer, the servers, icon designers, himself and the business has other costs/expenses. Yes, he is probably doing quite well for himself but this is a case where I really don’t see a problem with that. At $20M a year he would have to jack up his prices and drop the free tier (or jack up prices further) and a lot of those people are only halfway through their subscription at best, how does he afford them? Remember Reddit told him this year that they had no plans to change the API this year.
You want to make it out as if he is wealthy beyond compare and rallying a mob against poor, old, non-profitable reddit. Reddit chooses to be non-profitable. Their headcount is high, they’ve made increasingly unpopular/anti-community changes, and they refuse to provide decent tools to moderators after years of promising to and failing to deliver. Reddit primed the pump then took away one of few places where reddit can still shine, 3rd party apps, reddit did this to themselves. They have ignored every single off-ramp afforded to them after making this bad decision and have now been caught lying multiple times. Reddit has but to look in the mirror to know who to blame for this.
The Apollo guy is a real head scratcher. He probably could have charged $10/month to more than cover his costs, and had 10's of thousands of paying subscribers. Or, you know, implement a caching layer.
