Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by relix 1114 days ago
I personally don’t understand the outrage. Reddit obviously has costs, and if it wants to make a profit it should not subsidise third party apps that cost double - both no revenue and no ad views.

The cost of 0,00024 per request seems reasonable, and according to Apollo’s creator the cost per app user would be just 2,5 a month. Keep in mind that currently this app probably has no incentive to go light on the requests, so with some tinkering the creator could probably get that down. Maybe some proxy caching or what not.

Of course free is going away, but paying users at say 5/mo or 50/yr should still work for Apollo.
2 comments
thx-2718 1114 days ago
That's assuming that Apollo brings in enough revenue to cover the costs and they want to run a business.

I'm not a user of that App so excuse me if I am mistaken, if Apollo is currently free and without ads then the developer had a lot less to worry about then than now.

Additionally the outrage, as far as I am aware, has less to do with Reddit needing to make money rather it's way of going about making money is killing the user experience which kills the point of the website.

link
relix 1114 days ago
No, that's not the thing, they are already a business. They sell three tiers of the app, one of which is a subscription. The current price of the subscription is $13/year.

> Additionally the outrage, as far as I am aware, has less to do with Reddit needing to make money rather it's way of going about making money is killing the user experience which kills the point of the website.

It's not killing the user experience, it's making the nice user experience "just" more expensive, which I covered in my first comment.

link
thx-2718 1114 days ago
" It's not killing the user experience, it's making the nice user experience "just" more expensive, which I covered in my first comment. "

So there's a point where that price is too high for people to bother paying. 13/year maybe acceptable, is 26/year?

This will lose Reddit users which loses the point of the site (for the users). Which is killing the user experience.

link
Peanuts99 1113 days ago
Why don't they just charge the user directly for the ability to use the API in that case?
link