I still don't understand the Apollo collapse. The creator seemed to have convinced themselves that their users would not be willing to pay to continue using the app - despite the outpouring of love Apollo enjoyed. It all seemed very short sighted and emotional.
Apollo had a yearly subscription while switching over to the new Reddit API structure would require a monthly fee. That puts you in a spot where you may have users that are still on a yearly plan and not paying in while incurring massive monthly API costs. It was the sudden short notice of API costs increases that caused the whole thing to collapse
"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."
Refund at a pro-rated rate, be frank with users and tell them the situation and why you have to raise prices - then raise prices.
I doubt users would have revolted had the subscription gone up to $19.95 or even $29.95 a year. Heck, my hiking app is more than that annually, and I barely use it.
I remain convinced Apollo had options, but the creator was convinced it was an impossible situation. It was not. There was an outpouring of support and people willing to spend money on an app they saw immense personal value in.
> I doubt users would have revolted had the subscription gone up
I don't doubt this, actually. I was a user of Apollo. I purchased the Pro Unlock for $5, and I did this only because it was a 1 time purchase. If it were a $5/mo subscription, I would have never used the app. Sure, I'm just one person and maybe many others don't feel the same way, but I have a hunch many do. Especially with the amount of subscriptions flying around these days, many people are getting frustrated by constantly having to subscribe.
Even if 80% of users stopped using Apollo, the rest could have still been sustainable and/or profitable.
50,000 paying users. That's incredible. Apollo could have even gotten loans to cover the interim if needed. There were many options to continue forward. The creator took none of them.
My guess is the creator was emotionally exhausted by the ordeal and was not in the head-space to deal with such a disruptive change. Unfortunately, brilliant creators/engineers are not always the best suited to operate the business, especially during troubled times.
Reddit designed this pricing change specifically to kill off 3rd party apps. If Apollo jumped through this hoop, there would be another in the future. There wouldn't be any winning this game.
Maybe, maybe not. It's unreasonable to expect a company to offer free services that make you money. Therefore it's not unreasonable to pay something for access to the content that makes your app successful.
No matter what the API fees are - if Apollo provided value to it's users, it would have users willing to pay for it. Like I previously said - many apps cost $30-50+ annually to use - and the users are happy to pay. Apollo users probably on-average used the app daily.
So refund in full and do the rest? That's what happened anyway, isn't it (the refund)?
The point was there were options, but the creator didn't seek them. So many people wanted that app to continue living - I find it impossible to believe the creator couldn't get an extra $1 a month (or even a lot more!) from those users.
How many apps can boast they have 50,000 paying customers? People need to appreciate just how difficult of an accomplishment that already is. The paying users loved the app, and would have paid more to continue using it - especially in light of the available information at the time.
A massive proportion of us didn't request a refund. I don't know the percentage, but I would not be surprised is most users didn't ask for a refund of $10.
You're probably right that there was some way for Christian to navigate this and keep Apollo up. But I also don't blame him one bit for throwing his hands up after how that whole API debacle went down. Must've been pretty stressful.
I believe Apollo was open sourced after it's demise. You could run it yourself but then you'd have to contend with the intentionally difficulty of installing software on the iphone.
Ok, but it was inevitable Reddit wouldn't offer free services to businesses making profit off of their content forever. The creator must have wondered at some point how long the free gravy was going to continue flowing? Why no exit plan of any kind, or even an attempt?
> it was inevitable Reddit wouldn't offer free services to businesses making profit off of their content forever
Their content. The audacity. Reddit is built on users' content and on free moderation. Sure it was inevitable that Reddit would lock things down for profit. But lets not pretend that this is Reddit's content.
For the 3rd time you are entirely incorrect. I won't quote the TOS again for you, as I have done twice already.
The moment you post to reddit, they can do anything they want with the content. It is now theirs.
It's also naïve to say reddit was built upon users' content. Yes the content is the most important bit and the reasons users are there today - but that ignores all of the software and infrastructure that made it all possible. There's a reason reddit is what it is today, and it was not an accident.
> The moment you post to reddit, they can do anything they want with the content. It is now theirs.
This is patently false. The content is not theirs, users grant Reddit a license to their content. See the TOS [1] you spoke of:
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
This isn't just some bit of semantics either. If you can contact the users, you could request a license for the content yourself. So really the only bastion Reddit has is technical measures for preventing scraping, since publicly accessible data is allowed to be scraped in the US due to legal precedent. That is, nothing in the TOS prevents other parties from displaying the data in other formats (as long as they don't use the API). The thing is, all the apps did make use of the API because they were not adversarial with Reddit, as opposed to webapps like libreddit that circumvent the API altogether.
I never understood why Reddit couldn’t just have kept the API free, and embedded ads in the feed directly. They would get their ad revenue, and third party developers would actually help them make money.
Probably because it would be easy to filter those ads from the feeds.
The facts were businesses like Apollo built themselves upon Reddit's value-proposition. The content is what the users wanted - and Reddit had the content. Apollo's value-add was making that content more accessible to users - at Reddit's expense.
We can debate how Reddit handled the rollout - but the facts are businesses like Apollo offered little to Reddit in exchange for Reddit's content.
People operating businesses based on someone else's data (moat) should have an exit plan for when the free ride ends.
From a legal point-of-view, yes, Reddit had control of the data and chose to alter the deal. And the app developer did have an exit plan: shutting down the app and refunding subscribers. The developer appears to have weighed his options, considered the strategy Reddit was communicating with the rollout of their API changes, and concluded that this was no longer a viable market.
Many people expressed strong opinions about what the developer should do, but he appears to have remained calm and rational throughout the experience, and chose to walk away when it made sense.
However:
> The content is what the users wanted - and Reddit had the content...
> ...in exchange for Reddit's content...
> ...operating businesses based on someone else's data (moat)...
Let's not fool ourselves: the data was created by and for the users, and it never belonged to Reddit in any moral sense. It's a regrettable externality of our legal framework that Reddit was able to withdraw their free API and prevent the community from accessing its own data how it saw fit.
> The Services may contain information, text, links, graphics, photos, videos, audio, streams, software, tools, or other materials (“Content”), including Content created with or submitted to the Services by you or through your Account (“Your Content”). We take no responsibility for and we do not expressly or implicitly endorse, support, or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any of Your Content.
> By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
Twice you have deliberately left out literally the most important bit. I'll quote it for you:
> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
It's theirs the moment you click post - and there's nothing you can do about it.
The content wasn't Reddit's, it was simply hosted on Reddit. It was actually owned by the users, many of whom were using apps to benefit Reddit via additional content and moderation.
I have actually. The way it's always worked for Reddit (and social media in general) is that you provide them a license to do things with the content, but the site doesn't take ownership of the content. This isn't a meaningless distinction either. It's a key part of Reddit's legal shield from all the illegal content they unknowingly host, via things like section 230.
> The Services may contain information, text, links, graphics, photos, videos, audio, streams, software, tools, or other materials (“Content”), including Content created with or submitted to the Services by you or through your Account (“Your Content”). We take no responsibility for and we do not expressly or implicitly endorse, support, or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any of Your Content.
> By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
It was so well-loved that someone cloned it for the fediverse version of Reddit: Voyager for Lemmy is a near-clone of Apollo for Reddit, but using web technology.
I have now moved my Reddit usage fully to Lemmy because the official app was just such a pain to use.
