[paxys]

I highly doubt a different dollar amount would have changed the outcome. Reddit wanted $2.50 per user from the Apollo dev. Would $2 have been more palatable? Or $1.50? Would the extra few cents per month really make the difference between a user subscribing or not?

The conversation is really only about free vs not free. Everything else is a smokescreen.

[nocoiner]

Eh, at some threshold, of course a lower price would have changed the outcome. It sounds like the Apollo dev thought API costs came in at 10-20x what he’d been expecting. I think there’s obviously a huge difference between paying Reddit, say, 50 cents of a $3 net payment (assuming a sub for the app is $5/month) and having a $5/user/month cover charge to Reddit as the price of admission, and then having to build a viable app business over that. Seems dubious.

[shagie]

The average user doing ~300 api calls per day would do about 9000 calls per month and at $0.24/1k calls would be $2/user

Apollo also does polling of the message box for each user for push notifications ( https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/main/i... ) which currently has a rate of 1/minute/user. This is another 1.4k calls per day and changes the price that would be paid.

Current rate: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...

March 16th rate update (6 r/m to 1r/m): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/commit/74a8...

Nov 22nd rate update (12 r/m to 6 r/m): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/commit/7582...

[flutas]

Not sure why you're making up stuff still and cherry picking constants to try and pretend you're right.

Those rates are BEST CASE. I linked the code directly to you that actually does it in your previous comment.

They queue 100[0] users every 5[1] seconds to pull their status, they then update the next check timestamp in the db to be at now + the constant you quote[2] which they use for rate limiting, so at most once per minute.

So unless they have under 1,000 users, then it won't ever be "every single minute."

[0]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...

[1]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...

[2]: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...

[nocoiner]

OK, so whatever numbers you want to use, whether it’s $2 in direct Reddit api access charges or $5, same order of magnitude, probably neither moves the needle that much relative to the other.

But I think there’s a huge difference between that charge being 20 cents and $2 (or 50 cents and $5).

[shagie]

From the API calls that you'd need to pass on to the user, this is a difference of $2/month for no push notifications (9000 calls) vs $10/month (9k calls + 30 * 1.4k calls is about 50k calls). Add on top of that a 30% Apple subscription cost (15% after a year), and we're to $3/month and $13/month and a bit of padding and a slim profit and you're at $5/month and $15/month.

If Reddit is saying "it's $2 for the 300 calls per day" that is claimed for the mobile app usage they're correct looking at what they charge for API calls based on the developer saying that the average user does 345 calls/day from the mobile app.

From the app develop perspective who also has a polling back end and an apple subscription cut and maintaining the same profit as before on top of it all, they're likely looking at closer to $20/month for that same user (noting that previously they were charing $4.99 and it was almost all profit for that user).

[nocoiner]

I think we are possibly just completely talking past each other, or perhaps just merely in violent agreement with each other.

[8note]

A change in start time would be more impactful, so that he could ramp up charging his users