Popular Reddit App Apollo Shutting Down on June 30

[AbSoluTc]

Imagine telling Wal-mart you will use their entire infrastructure for FREE to sell your own stuff and getting mad they now want to make you pay to use their store to sell your goods all while already charging users a monthly/yearly fee.

Wish I could down vote you to OBLIVION!

The Dev of Apollo isn't saying that at all. He's saying that Reddit now wants 20 million for what used to be free. There's free and then there's freaking excessive. 20 million is robbery disguised as API costs. Reddit already has monthly premiums if members want it. They have ads galore in their own app and web interface (hence why I use Apollo). They're hiding NSFW from any 3rd part except their own app/web. It's clearly a bid to milk as much money out of everyone as possible. They also want that GOOD GOOD GOOD valuation to get more monies.

 

[AbSoluTc]

Imagine crying for an app that didn't pay Reddit using their data for years. Reddit is not a charity.

Apollo can raise money through advertisement or include 3rd party subscriptions via the Apple Store to keep it running, but instead they choose to blackmail Reddit.

Reddit is going to do an IPO soon and investors want to see money, it is as simple as that.

Who do you think made Reddit?

Me and millions of others. We are Reddit. The community of people that freely donate their time to mod the subs, keep it going, clean, following the rules. Who benefits from that? The company trying to get it's IPO. They do nothing but provide the servers and pipe. They benefit 100% from users who ARE Reddit.

Reddit is NOTHING without it's users. Please don't forget that. I'm pretty sure if Reddit pisses off enough people, there are plenty that can make Reddit non-existent for it.

 

[Zest28]

What absolute nonsense. It’s clearly laid out that their idea of being paid for, an earning they would not have if the same users use their own product, is not viable to a developer of that size. But sure go right ahead and pretend that there would have been a reasonable solution in spite of the evidence.
And all of that for a comment on something you don’t even use or seem to have paid any attention to in detail. Posting spite outside of your interest zone must be an appealing hobby to some.

Please. Apollo has around 1 million users on average per day. So if they introduce a monthly subscription plan of $1.99 per month, they cover the $20 million that is needed to keep using Reddit their data.

All is needed is Apollo users to pay $1.99 per month. It is simple math.

ChatGPT has used Reddit their data too for free, so it’s really understandable that with the IPO, Reddit is going to shut down their free API and change to a paid API.

 

[ericwn]

Please. Apollo has around 1 million users on average per day. So if they introduce a monthly subscription plan of $1.99 per month, they cover the $20 million that is needed to keep using Reddit their data.

All is indeed is Apollo users to pay $1.99 per month. It is simple math.

ChatGPT has used Reddit their data too for free, so it’s really understandable that with the IPO, Reddit is going to shut down their free API and change to a paid API.

Excellent. Your road into business advisory is clearly laid out. Makes one wonder how the incredibly invested creator of the app didn’t come to the same conclusion about the practicality as our typical non user armchair coaches on MR.

 

[Zest28]

Excellent. Your road into business advisory is clearly laid out. Makes one wonder how the incredibly invested creator of the app didn’t come to the same conclusion about the practicality as our typical non user armchair coaches on MR.

Did you ever take math lessons? It’s a very simple equation.

Problem is, you and other Redditors just argue on ”gut feelings” rather than facts.

 

[arvinsim]

This is super unfortunate news, but I don't believe people will stop using Reddit all together. I love Apollo, but I'm certainly not going to give up Reddit over this.

Anybody who says they will should authentically ask themself, "Am I never going to log in again? Am I never going to READ the result of a Google search if I see it comes from Reddit?"

I think I will still use Reddit.

But I will certainly cut back on my usage because I am not willing to use the official iOS app.

 

[Zest28]

Who do you think made Reddit?

Me and millions of others. We are Reddit. The community of people that freely donate their time to mod the subs, keep it going, clean, following the rules. Who benefits from that? The company trying to get it's IPO. They do nothing but provide the servers and pipe. They benefit 100% from users who ARE Reddit.

Reddit is NOTHING without it's users. Please don't forget that. I'm pretty sure if Reddit pisses off enough people, there are plenty that can make Reddit non-existent for it.

Indeed. You are the product and Reddit owns this data. And it is within Reddit their right to monetize this data.

ChatGPT has been trained on data from Reddit and Reddit has received nothing from it, so it’s fair that Reddit and it’s investors decide now to be compensated for it.

 

[ericwn]

Did you ever take math lessons? It’s a very simple equation.

Problem is, you and other Redditors just argue on ”gut feelings” rather than facts.

Have you spent any time reading the context?

“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.”

I rest my case here but sure go ahead and give us all another episode of your great business skills to outsmart the company actually involved in the product.

 

[justin216]

Just greed driving a series of errors and missteps.

Better way to go about this would be for users to go to Reddit, put in their credit card to cover their own usage to be billed monthly, get a token, and feed the token into Apollo, replacing the Apollo "master" token we all browsed through. Apollo can be billed separately however it will be billed (subscription, one-time, whatever), but Apollo shouldn't bill me for my Reddit usage -- Reddit should. Maybe that was on the table at one point or another, maybe it still is, but the narrative is painful.

Let's not make Reddit out to be innocent in this regardless. Yes, the API was costing them money to run. Yes, third-party apps were going around ads. But they still got the engagement and data, things that definitely help drive this imminent IPO valuation. This could have been a longer-term dialog in the spirit of partnership, not a "we need to do this right now, you have 30-60-90 days to comply" with ultimatums.

Heck -- even acquiring some of these third-parties would have made sense. They bought Alien Blue a few years ago. Certainly could have worked out a deal to buy Apollo, RIF, etc. I don't know of anyone that loves the official Reddit app if they've used any of the larger alternatives like Apollo.

I'm in the corporate world, I get both sides. Just unfortunate nonetheless, feels like a cleaner path could have been forged.

 

[AbSoluTc]

Just greed driving a series of errors and missteps.

Better way to go about this would be for users to go to Reddit, put in their credit card to cover their own usage to be billed monthly, get a token, and feed the token into Apollo, replacing the Apollo "master" token we all browsed through. Apollo can be billed separately however it will be billed (subscription, one-time, whatever), but Apollo shouldn't bill me for my Reddit usage -- Reddit should. Maybe that was on the table at one point or another, maybe it still is, but the narrative is painful.

Let's not make Reddit out to be innocent in this regardless. Yes, the API was costing them money to run. Yes, third-party apps were going around ads. But they still got the engagement and data, things that definitely help drive this imminent IPO valuation. This could have been a longer-term dialog in the spirit of partnership, not a "we need to do this right now, you have 30-60-90 days to comply" with ultimatums.

Heck -- even acquiring some of these third-parties would have made sense. They bought Alien Blue a few years ago. Certainly could have worked out a deal to buy Apollo, RIF, etc. I don't know of anyone that loves the official Reddit app if they've used any of the larger alternatives like Apollo.

I'm in the corporate world, I get both sides. Just unfortunate nonetheless, feels like a cleaner path could have been forged.

This is the way.

As a Reddit/Apollo user, I would have supported this. Would it suck? Sure, but it's a better alternative that cutting off all 3rd party apps. All corporate greed.

 

[yaxomoxay]

Did you ever take math lessons? It’s a very simple equation.

No it’s not. First of all, of the million daily users, many are the same person and the vast majority don’t pay. You have to figure out how many unique users log in during a pay period. If it’s a monthly $1.99 fee, and you have 1,000,000 unique users a month, that’s $2,000,000. In your math, the pay period is either daily or is considering the total amount of repeat users.

Also, thinking that all of the current user base will accept a $1.99 fee (even if monthly) - while there’s alternative - completely disregards how monetization works.

 

[Stewie]

I seriously doubt most of them are using a 3rd party app. No need to wait for time. I’m telling you right now.

Ah. The old pulling stats out the ass comment.

 

[Zest28]

Have you spent any time reading the context?

“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.”

I rest my case here but sure go ahead and give us all another episode of your great business skills to outsmart the company actually involved in the product.

Popular Reddit app Apollo may go out of business over Reddit's new, unaffordable API pricing | TechCrunch

The maker of Apollo, one of the most popular third-party mobile apps for browsing Reddit, may have to close up shop due to Reddit's new API pricing terms.

techcrunch.com

"Apollo today has around 1.3 million to 1.5 million monthly active users, Selig told TechCrunch, and roughly 900,000 daily active users."

So average_cost_per_user = $20 million / 900.000 = $22 per year or $1.85 / month.

So if every user pays $1.85 per month, it is covered.

If he looses users, it doesn't matter because this is what it costs per user. This is the break-even price for each user individually.

So if he charges $1.99 per person who wants to use Apollo, the costs of Reddit are covered.

 

[yaxomoxay]

Popular Reddit app Apollo may go out of business over Reddit's new, unaffordable API pricing | TechCrunch

The maker of Apollo, one of the most popular third-party mobile apps for browsing Reddit, may have to close up shop due to Reddit's new API pricing terms.

techcrunch.com

"Apollo today has around 1.3 million to 1.5 million monthly active users, Selig told TechCrunch, and roughly 900,000 daily active users."

So average_cost_per_user = 20 million / 900.000 = $22 per year or $1.85 / month.

So if every user pays $1.85 per month, it is covered.

If he looses users, it doesn't matter because this is what it costs per user. This is the break-even price for each user.

So if he charges $1.99 per person who wants to use Apollo, he actually makes a profit.

I don’t know if the fact that you think he can convert 1,500,000 users (many are repeat, I had about 5 accounts on Reddit and 3 using Apollo) to a $24/year fee to use Reddit is more charming or just appalling.

 

[Zest28]

I don’t know if the fact that you think he can convert 1,500,000 users (many are repeat, I had about 5 accounts on Reddit and 3 using Apollo) to a $24/year fee to use Reddit is more charming or just appalling.

It doesn't matter how much he converts. He just needs to charge more than a user costs. And a user costs on average only $1.85/month.

Even if he converts only 100.000 users out of the 1.500.000 users, as long as he charges $1.99/month the costs of Reddit are covered.

 

[yaxomoxay]

It doesn't matter how much he converts. He just needs to charge more than a user costs. And a user costs on average only $1.85/month

what the heck! Seriously? He “just needs to charge more” than the cost? That’s your solution? Wow. Maybe, just maybe convincing the customer to actually pay is usually a serious problem to face, especially if there’s a free alternative?

 

[Zest28]

what the heck! Seriously? He “just needs to charge more” than the cost? That’s your solution? Wow. Maybe, just maybe convincing the customer to actually pay is usually a serious problem to face, especially if there’s a free alternative?

Nothing is free. If something is free, it means you are the product and they make money indirectly of you.

Problem is stuff like ChatGPT has been using you as a product without paying Reddit so they are putting a stop to it. So yes, ChatGPT will have to pay Reddit too in the future, even if there are free alternatives.

Big data is becoming very important now with the rise of AI. Everybody needs big data to train their models and Reddit just happens to own big data that they can sell.

 

[laptech]

Imagine crying for an app that didn't pay Reddit using their data for years. Reddit is not a charity.

Apollo can raise money through advertisement or include 3rd party subscriptions via the Apple Store to keep it running, but instead they choose to blackmail Reddit.

Reddit is going to do an IPO soon and investors want to see money, it is as simple as that.

You clearly have not been following this story very well have you. Reddit provided their API for free, they did not ask any money for it's use as stated by the app developer. The app developer has also stated that they are more than willing to pay Reddit for the use of it's API but not at the price Reddit has stated.

The one who is using blackmail is Reddit by basically saying pay us $20 million a year (based on Apollo's current usage) or say bye bye.

 

[ericwn]

what the heck! Seriously? He “just needs to charge more” than the cost? That’s your solution? Wow. Maybe, just maybe convincing the customer to actually pay is usually a serious problem to face, especially if there’s a free alternative?

Don’t question them, they made a one minute calculation and think they have the entire Apollo business model figured out. That’s also why they’re posting this groundbreaking advice here, because that’s the only easy part to that equation.

 

[dasmb]

Is it unreasonable, or do we just have a view of what software should cost that was distorted by decades of cheap capital and a mandate to grow the platform at any cost?

What's the true cost in hardware and manpower required to support hundreds of millions of server requests that don't add directly to revenue?

 

[yaxomoxay]

Nothing is free. If something is free, it means you are the product and they make money indirectly of you.

Ok? So? That doesn’t change that convincing people to pay is one of the hardest things to do, that’s why often they prefer the “free” alternative.

Let me know when you convince a bank to give you a loan for investing based on this type of math you use.

 

[PaintTheSkyGrey]

I have nothing to gain. I hate reddit. The discussions there are all echo chamber. The earlier it dies the better for culture in general to be honest.

But why I'm worked up it's because this younger generation has such an entitled opinion vs corporations. Corporations' one and only ONE objective is to maximize profit. There literally is no other objectives written in the rule book. Don't come home crying to find that corporations are doing what they can to make more money.

Users should have no expectations on free service (let alone the fact that the service isn't even pulled, it's simply degraded). Here's another analogy. If you went ahead and gave your neighbour free cookies every weekend (as free taste testing), and then your neighbour went ahead and started selling them to make a living. Then one week, without notice you just told them no more free cookies. Who's in the wrong here? You could say, fck! My income was dependent on the sale of those cookies, you've completely yanked the rug under me!!! Well, yes but is it wrong? No. Those are free cookies FFS.

I hope you can see how ridiculously entitled you all are coming off as right now.

The more appropriate analogy here is that you started collecting ingredients from people in your community (for free), letting other people bake them in your ovens, and then giving the cookies out for free to anyone that asked. You made profits by selling data collected about cookie preferences and displaying ads to your cookie makers - so also not quite "for free". Some people decided to start packaging these cookies and providing a better end-user experience with the cookies, and charged a reasonable fee for this experience. They also provide enhancements that make it easier for your bakers to actually bake the cookies. You fully knew about this. You worked with them to improve integration between your process and their processes. You continued to accept donations from the community in terms of people making cookies and also providing ingredients. You simply provide the ovens and foot the electricity/gas bill. You then say you will continue taking things for free from the community, will continue to monetize their labor, but you will start charging the folks repackaging an exorbitant amount of money because you are trying to get your cookie business bought by a larger organization and can't have people providing a better end-user experience (otherwise you would charge a more reasonable rate if it was really just about lost ad revenue).

You still expect the people donating ingredients (posters and commentors) and bakers (moderators) to continue working to generate you money while removing tools that make their jobs easier. You also can't understand why the community is upset that your tacit agreement to freely use their stuff to make you money while allowing them to freely access their cookies in whatever form they choose has been tossed out of the window on a whim, because they need to squeak out a little bit more money.

No one is saying this behavior is illegal. It also extends well past Apollo, to other third party apps and integrations. Moderator toolbox is a huge one that may not be able to exist after the end of the month. There is a reason massive subreddits are shutting down, some indefinitely. Folks that think only Apollo's user base are the ones impacted, so it will be a negligible impact on Reddit overall aren't fully aware of the entire situation. Mod functions are next to useless on the first party app, and mod toolbox makes moderating much easier in a desktop browser. Third-party apps filled a massive void here, and is a huge reason for much of the discontent. Reddit taking away the tools to curate the content (for free) the community provides them (for free) isn't exactly the smartest idea.

 

[laptech]

Also, if the stats for Apollo show that it is more popular than Reddit's own app then surely the correct way to do things is to hire the Apollo developer and amalgamate both apps into one rather than show they do not like having their pride hurt by forcing the developer to shutdown their app and potentially go out of business.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Everyone should be doing this.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1666879012151361554

Never had it installed in the first place. I like the suggestion of deleting all content one ever posted then deleting one's account. Reddit needs to lose content over this, it's literally the only way they will care about this.

 

[podycust]

Any VCs out there looking to make a Reddit competitor? Christian can lead it. I’ll throw my hat into the investor ring, too, if needed.

it already exist its called lemmy like mastodon it self hosted, I've sent one up on a ops to experiment with it