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Apollo will close down on June 30th

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Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#221

Post by Alupis »

jsheard wrote: post #157
com2kid wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit should try honestly. "We are losing lots of money, we need to start making money, reddit gold isn't bringing in enough revenue to pay the bills. 3rd party apps don't show ads, which costs us a lot of money every month. Keeping the 3rd party APIs up and running also costs us money. Because Reddit needs to stop losing money, we are closing down 3rd party apps." I don't know what why it is so hard to say that...

Reddit had an easy way out for the issue of 3rd party apps not showing ads, they already have a paid subscription which removes the ads on the official clients, so they could have made the API exclusive to users with a subscription. People would have been upset, but not this upset.

> they already have a paid subscription which removes the ads on the official clients

Apollo is shutting down because the founder thinks they'll incur about $2.50 per month of costs per user, and apparently doesn't believe enough people will be willing to pay $5 monthly to keep Apollo running.

So, this Reddit Premium (billed at $5.99 monthly) either has few-to-no paid users, or Apollo's founder isn't even trying to sustain his business.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#222

Post by mynameisvlad »

Alupis wrote: post #172
robbiet480 wrote: post #14

I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this. Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recor…

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 - h…

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.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#223

Post by Ekaros »

robotnikman wrote: post #60
Ekaros wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And exactly what are they losing from business perspective? Few users that generate only costs?

Most of the content on reddit is created by power users who are more likely to use 3rd party tools. Most people who use the official app only consume content.

So do they really use a phone app to produce this massive number of content?

Then again. I hate using my phone in general, so I always think that any content creators would use desktop and maybe old reddit.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#224

Post by bradac56 »

robbiet480 wrote: post #14

I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this. Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recor…

[flagged]

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#225

Post by kmac_ »

com2kid wrote: post #125
robbiet480 wrote: post #14

I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this. Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recor…

Reddit should try honestly. "We are losing lots of money, we need to start making money, reddit gold isn't bringing in enough revenue to pay the bills. 3rd party apps don't show ads, which costs us a lot of money every month. Keeping the 3rd party APIs up and running also costs us money. Because Reddit needs to stop losing money, we are closing down 3rd party apps." I don't know what why it is so hard to say that...

I wonder if Reddit ever considered and calculated options like showing ads, selling reddit gold and merchandise through partner apps. Maybe it could be coined into win-win-win but ended as it is.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#226

Post by Jackim »

_yb2s wrote: post #215

Do you guys really expect a for profit company to offer free API access to 3rd parties, that offer a better experience with no ads, bypassing their revenue stream, and making their own site and apps look terrible in comparison? I've always been shocked Reddit allowed this at all. No other major player that owns a platform- FB, instagram, Google, etc. offers this either. I don't like it either but it makes perfect sen…

The developers aren't asking for a free API, just one that is justified based on reddit's costs.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#227

Post by waboremo »

Scarblac wrote: post #81
justusthane wrote: post #12

Apollo is such an incredibly high quality app — in fact, it’s so good that I haven’t had it installed on my phone in a couple of years because when I have it I spend way too much time on Reddit. The features, the polish, the customizability — everything about it is really top notch.

I had never heard of it before this. Could he just make a backend for it and take his users with him?

Technically possible, but not really feasible due to the way Reddit is set up and people who signed up for the app agreed to. It would be a gigantic mess, and I reckon he's not interested in creating a new social platform/link aggregate which is why he would rather refund the ~$250k.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#229

Post by mustacheemperor »

koolba wrote: post #48
robbiet480 wrote: post #14

I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this. Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recor…

> Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this? If spez wasn’t fired on the spot for abusing his power to manually edit posts critical of him, why would you expect them to sack him over something that actually has a legitimate business angle?

This seems like an even more egregious act, it's like attempted character assassination of a developer beloved by the community. This app got shouted out in WWDC and Spez's decision shortly after is to concoct an alternate reality where Christian is a villain and present it as fact, and then get caught almost immediately.

It seems apparent Spez is burdened by a serious lack of ethics, and I think that burden is now compromising Reddit as well much more than before. As far as I know, going to IPO with a crook at the helm usually only works if they haven't been caught multiple times first.

Edit: Really, what an especially awful thing to do to a developer whose full-time job your policy change has just shut down - tell the world they're an extortionist liar from your comfy office.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#230

Post by apozem »

Scarblac wrote: post #81
justusthane wrote: post #12

Apollo is such an incredibly high quality app — in fact, it’s so good that I haven’t had it installed on my phone in a couple of years because when I have it I spend way too much time on Reddit. The features, the polish, the customizability — everything about it is really top notch.

I had never heard of it before this. Could he just make a backend for it and take his users with him?

You should read the post, he addresses this in it.
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