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Looks like theres a final surprise in the form of a song in Apollo now that it’s closed.
Can anyone identify the artist?
EDIT: someone managed to find it. From Christian’s YouTube page:
A fun parody of Sarah McLachlan's I Will Remember You performed by the incredible Zoe Wynns
I recommended his app to people, I paid for the subscription, I left a positive review on the appstore. I was a loyal user for a long time.
In the end, he tried (and fortunately failed) to sell Apollo to reddit, then just killed the app when that didn’t work. If he did care about users (aka the people that made him a lot of money), he could’ve sold the app to someone willing to continue it, or at least released it as open source.
It’s not the end of the world, and he didn’t eat a newborn baby or anything like that, but I don’t think people should be patting this guy on the back for the way he handled this. He just took the money and ran, abandoning his customers in the process. That’s not the type of business I want to support.
Reality check: vast majority of the people don’t give a shit what you or I do.
I am a day 1 user, bought lifetime pro within the month, and lifetime ultra on launch. I recommended the app to people. And guess what? No one gives a shit about me nor my recommendations. They’ve got their use out of the app; they’re happy that they’ve got a better Reddit experience while they were able to use the app; and now that the app is no more, they can be their own grown ass adults and decide what to do about the situation.
The app is down, due to no fault of the developer, and that’s that. And no, the developer didn’t take your money and ran with it. He’s offering refund for the unused subscription portion which yields a net deficit of estimated 250K USD that he will have to pay back to Apple after Apple Pay’s out people who doesn’t opt out. Given the situation, do you have 250K USD liquid cash to pay Apple on a 30 days notice, or would you rather ask nicely for some to choose to opt out of the refund? Because if you don’t, then maybe you shouldn’t be whining about your $13/yr subscription that you’re getting your prorated refund by choosing to not opt out.
The “bad guy” of the story is Reddit’s management. Not even so much for their goal of killing third party apps — their platform, their rules, that’s why we’re no longer on their platforms, and no longer playing by their rules — but rather their approach to the problem every step of the way. They could’ve announced a longer run way — “Starting 2024/01/01…” would’ve gave Christian (and other app devs) ample time to pivot and update their subscription model to make it work; limiting the maximum number of users (a-la Twitter in mid 2010s), however bad, would’ve still allowed the app to continue to exist. Demanding $20M/year on a 30 days notice, slander the devs, and actively suppress the entire moderation and user community? Bold move Reddit, let’s see how this will play out in a couple of months. Third party apps are likely but the first casualties of their decisions to implement this change.
It’s not that hard to understand that the price he pitched to Reddit was simply a way to show how outrageous it was. All he did was simply say okay you are charging me x per month so then you are evaluating my app at x dollars. Since the amount he offered was very low compared to “long term evaluation” just to show how stupid they are.
So what this dude didn’t sell off his app to someone else? He has been making that app for a decade. If he was just trying to sell it like you’re implying then he easily could have. He was making a point.
Imagine you worked on something you loved for a decade and then out of nowhere it got ripped out from under you and it wasn’t usable or financially responsible to keep it going. Would you just go off and sell whatever it was or be like “hmm… maybe I should keep this since I’ve spent so many years on it and adored it. I could also just take a step back and relax before thinking about a way I could make it work”.
It’s this thing called having empathy for other people and understanding how having something like that happen could discourage you and make you want to just take a bit to yourself without immediately thinking about the next step.
Don’t make sense why you are so up in arms about people having empathy and respecting the decisions the dev made.
What most people missed, much less understood, from that interaction is that Reddit justified the API cost based on “opportunity cost”.
This means that Reddit was saying that they weren’t trying to kill off third party apps but that they simply were trying to charge $20MM/y to recoup the earnings they’re losing out on by virtue of people using Apollo instead of Reddit’s own offerings.
So yeah, like you said, he clearly tried to call BS on the price motivation by essentially saying “if my mere existence is causing you to lose out on $20MM/y of earnings, why don’t you cut a check for $10MM to buy Apollo”.
Because logically if it really was about opportunity cost and the pricing of $20MM/y would accurately reflect that, then a one time $10MM purchase would be such a steal compared to losing $20MM/y, it would have any CEO scrambling to sign a check the moment the option was even so much as whispered.
Instead the API pricing was simply a ploy to kill off third party apps and the “opportunity cost” nonsense was mere pretext to be able to maintain that it wasn’t about killing off third party apps.
Not to mention that outside of the vacuum of this specific matter, the whole ordeal was littered with duplicitous lies, like how it would be a fair and reasonable price when every other comparable API is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper, safe for Muskrat’s.
Imgur for example would charge $166/50 million request, compared to Reddit’s $12,000 for the same amount. Or put it differently, Imgur charges $276,666/y compared to Reddit’s $20MM/y.