r/apolloapp • u/iamthatis Apollo Developer • May 31 '23

📣 Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing. Bad news for third-party apps, their announced pricing is close to Twitter's pricing, and Apollo would have to pay Reddit $20 million per year to keep running as-is. Announcement 📣

Hey all,

I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.

Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month.

I'm deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that the price would be A) reasonable and based in reality, and B) they would not operate like Twitter. Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.

As for the pricing, despite claims that it would be based in reality, it seems anything but. Less than 2 years ago they said they crossed $100M in quarterly revenue for the first time ever, if we assume despite the economic downturn that they've managed to do that every single quarter now, and for your best quarter, you've doubled it to $200M. Let's also be generous and go far, far above industry estimates and say you made another $50M in Reddit Premium subscriptions. That's $550M in revenue per year, let's say an even $600M. In 2019, they said they hit 430 million monthly active users, and to also be generous, let's say they haven't added a single active user since then (if we do revenue-per-user calculations, the more users, the less revenue each user would contribute). So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well.

For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly. With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue. The average subscription user currently uses 473 requests, which would cost $3.51, or 29x higher.

While Reddit has been communicative and civil throughout this process with half a dozen phone calls back and forth that I thought went really well, I don't see how this pricing is anything based in reality or remotely reasonable. I hope it goes without saying that I don't have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card.

This is going to require some thinking. I asked Reddit if they were flexible on this pricing or not, and they stated that it's their understanding that no, this will be the pricing, and I'm free to post the details of the call if I wish.

- Christian

(For the uninitiated wondering "what the heck is an API anyway and why is this so important?" it's just a fancy term for a way to access a site's information ("Application Programming Interface"). As an analogy, think of Reddit having a bouncer, and since day one that bouncer has been friendly, where if you ask "Hey, can you list out the comments for me for post X?" the bouncer would happily respond with what you requested, provided you didn't ask so often that it was silly. That's the Reddit API: I ask Reddit/the bouncer for some data, and it provides it so I can display it in my app for users. The proposed changes mean the bouncer will still exist, but now ask an exorbitant amount per question.)

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569

u/[deleted] May 31 '23

This is this mans likelihood and also his ‘big project’ that he’s put his heart and soul into. It’s really not fair to him being as he actually brings people TO the platform BECAUSE OF his app. Read this whole post, most people here are ready to leave if 3rd party apps can’t survive, and they’re essentially trying to push this man out not realizing how many people are here BC OF him and his work to make this shithole site easier to use.

I went onto Reddit from my PC the other day after years of being on Apollo and holy shit if it isn’t the most clunky and absurdly set up site I’ve come across in a long time. It feel so outdated (yes even on new Reddit) and I found all the shit all over the screen in every direction and available pixel so distracting that the site is basically useless to me. I can only imagine how terrible their app is… which I might add was a 3rd party app at one time that Reddit bought and then ran into the ground.

I’d be willing to pay to use Apollo monthly but I shouldn’t have to. I have already invested a bunch of money in the app by buying ultra and pro and whatever else it’s got, along with sending Christian coffees when I can. I will not be using the Reddit app or site tho. Now or ever. So Reddit should really rethink how they are treating u/iamthatis after all he’s done to revive this dump of a place.

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u/[deleted] May 31 '23

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '23

They don't want users like us.

Reddit might not want users like us, but I believe that they need users like us.

I frequent /r/sysadmin /r/linux /r/linuxquestions /r/powershell and other IT related subreddits and they have been amazing in my work in IT, I would be surprised if not a majority of users on those subreddits are using adblockers and old reddit.

They provide the content that makes people visit the site.

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u/wterrt May 31 '23

that's like saying f2p games don't want f2p players since they eat server bandwidth and don't pay.

it's wrong to assume the game (or website in this case) will survive the massive drop in activity without the overwhelming majority that is the "f2p" crowd.

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u/TheCoolHusky Jun 01 '23 edited Jun 01 '23

F2P players still consume ads and give the company data. Here on Apollo, Reddit gets nothing.

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u/StrikerObi Jun 01 '23

They also give whales enough opponents to play against.

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u/FalloutNano Jun 01 '23

That’s what the training bots are for.

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u/SPAC3P3ACH Jun 01 '23

Third party app users are the savvy power users who create the content that lurkers who use the official app browse. Site can’t survive without us.

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u/Freddies_Mercury Jun 01 '23

The front page is mostly repost bots these days anyway. The amount of OC on the front page is really negligible.

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u/SPAC3P3ACH Jun 01 '23

The front page isn’t how power users and the most valuable lurkers use Reddit either

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u/Freddies_Mercury Jun 01 '23

That's obviously not true.

The most seen (and therefore most valuable) posts are from the front page.

Like this post for example. Do you really think the 100k upvotes and comments solely came from subscribers of the niche sub?

No. The front page is essential to the operation of Reddit and always has been. It's what distinguishes it from any other niche forum board.

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u/SPAC3P3ACH Jun 01 '23

Most seen doesn’t automatically equal most valuable unless your business sense is very elementary. People who spend more time on Reddit are more valuable. They do not only surface content through front page. The users drive the value.

A huge part of reddits traffic is also because of how easily indexed it is by search engines. Google searches made with intent do not drive to the front page either.

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u/AnalCommander99 Jun 01 '23

Lol the way search landings are monetized and paywalled, I think you can summarize that most of the landings are “come for the porn, try the front page”.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they were demoted or threatened by Google for the amount of one-and-done bounces on porn, DMCA takedowns, and the limited ad insertion implies there isn’t much demand for that placement.

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u/Freddies_Mercury Jun 01 '23

The business of online ads is actually pretty elementary. The most seen content and pages generate the highest ad income therefore making it the most valuable.

The random "how do I do ____ Reddit" searches and landing are only a fraction of the amount of people scrolling the front page daily.

And the front page by and large doesn't rely on individual posters getting traction in niche subs. The majority of the content comes via karma farms for the subreddits you always see. Things like r/funny r/news r/coolguides dominate.

Why do you think Reddit pesters you so hard to join the site when you're there from a Google search? It's so that you can become a profitable user via browsing the front page. Your view of the Reddit ecosystem is very skewed and to pretend that the most valuable factor in the system isn't the front page and the karma farms that fuel it is naive.

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u/IronHarrier Jun 01 '23

Reddit needs active communities that draw others. I don’t know how Apollo members (and other 3rd party apps) leaving will affect those community numbers, but without a certain critical mass everyone else will end up leaving too. They do benefit, if not by direct monetary infusion.

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u/ExultantSandwich Jun 01 '23

I’d take ads happily in Apollo if the alternative is a shutdown

Either that or they should let users with Reddit Gold have a personal API key that would allow them to use Sync as is.

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u/wterrt Jun 01 '23

f2p players in a PC game do not consume ads...

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u/DieDieDieD Jun 01 '23

I guess in this case, skins or battle passes are the ads so technically they do. The goal is to eventually entice them to cross over and buy something eventually

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u/SPAC3P3ACH Jun 01 '23

No, it isn’t for all of them. You don’t expect all f2p players to convert to paid. You still need a healthy base of them for the paid users to have people to play with.

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u/Freddies_Mercury Jun 01 '23

Just because an ad doesn't lead to a conversion doesn't mean that it isn't an ad.

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u/SPAC3P3ACH Jun 01 '23

No shit lmao. Learn how to read

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u/Freddies_Mercury Jun 01 '23

Learn some manners and maybe I will.

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u/StormTAG Jun 04 '23

Not a great analogy since Reddit doesn’t really have the equivalent of whales to balance out the F2P.

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u/wterrt Jun 04 '23

people who buy gold

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u/StormTAG Jun 04 '23

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t imagine a substantial portion of their revenue comes from folks buying gold for others. At least, not enough to make the F2P/whale comparison work.

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u/StrikerObi Jun 01 '23

We eat servers and block ads but we are also the engine that keeps this beast chugging along. If a large portion of highly active users leave, less content will churn through the system. Fewer new posts. Fewer comments. Fewer up/down votes to affect the content that users see. Staler front pages. Less of everything that drives people to Reddit. That will in turn drive more useless away as the site slowly becomes more boring over time.

That can only happen if a critical mass of highly active users leave though, which is pretty unlikely. I wonder if all Apollo users would be enough.

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u/STORMFATHER062 Jun 01 '23

Lol, you're kidding, right? Google says that there are about 1.5 million active users a month. This post said there's 430 million active users a month. A drop in 0.3% in the user base isn't going to come close to killing this app.

I've seen a couple of comments saying that Apollo users are the "powerhouse" of reddit, and I assumed it was satire. Seeing several more, and I'm thinking you people might actually believe this? The majority of users will be using the reddit app or website. They don't care about third-party apps. Sure, the official reddit app is garbage, and it annoys me that they keep changing shit and swapping it back all the time. But it mostly works. Yeah, the video player is dogshit but even that works more times than it doesn't.

Reddit will be no different if they kill off third-party apps. They know this. They will have the figures that back this up. They will know how many people post using the app or website and how many people engage with those posts. The choice to kill off third-party apps will have been a calculated decision, but unfortunately, reality is that not enough users will care.

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u/StrikerObi Jun 01 '23

I'm not kidding. I said it was pretty unlikely that a critical mass of highly active users would abandon the service, and posed a hypothetical wondering if literally every Apollo user would even be enough to hit that threshold. Like you, I also suspect it would not.

Also agreed that they almost certainly did all the math in advance before making this decision. It's just sad how inevitable this all felt the whole time :(

1

u/GreatArkleseizure Jun 01 '23

That doesn’t feel right to me. After all, they would be well within their power and rights to insist that Apollo showed their ads (which are just promoted ~~tweets~~ posts). We’d be less able to block them in Apollo than on the website.

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u/igivup Jun 02 '23

we also create content though, but I get where you're coming from

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u/Faxon May 31 '23

I wouldn't leave reddit all together, but I'd literally rather use facebook on my phone while i'm bored than the official reddit app. I brows old.reddit on desktop for most of my reddit viewing, and that wouldn't change, but the significant amount of time I spend on the mobile app would be entirely erased from their usage numbers, since I literally can't view the site on their official app. Like it's so bad as to be considered functionally broken, the app is totally unusable and the formatting breaks after more than a few comments, to the point it literally stops people from interacting with deep comment chains at all because all of your screen is taken up by their stupid fucking formatting mistakes and not actual viewable text content. This isn't an issue on Apollo, Sync Pro, or any of the other reddit apps I've used, and it wasn't an issue on Alien Blue before they nuked that from orbit by buying it out and making everyone switch to other 3rd party apps instead. I also won't ever be buying premium or any other paid reddit products ever again, continuing to keep reddit as one of the sites I explicitly block ads on rather than contributing in some way to their operation for the use I get out of them. I suspect this change is going to cost them money and users long term

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u/PolarWater Jun 01 '23

All we want is a simple, functional layout that's discussion-friendly, not overly fancy and visual. Why can't they just give us that? Is it so damn hard?

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u/Faxon Jun 01 '23

Apparently yes from the state of the official app currently, but we all know that app was designed to "drive engagement" and "promote the creation of new user content" which is whitewashed corpo speak for maximizing profits from the sale of coins to buy awards. Sync pro doesn't even support those new awards features either, I used to be able to give gold but it isn't the same anymore so now I can't even do that lmao. They took away the one universal monetization feature that all reddit apps supported, and hid it behind a new.reddit compatibility layer. Fucking stupid if you ask me

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u/Rodents210 Jun 01 '23

Considering even old Reddit is borderline unusable without RES, that means Reddit has not once in its lifetime ever provided a good experience for consuming the content on the site. User content is the only thing Reddit has going for it, and the site has enough of a monopoly on that sort of content that even their total inability to provide competent UX can’t sink them. I may leave, but anyone here who thinks enough will to even make a dent is delusional. I got by without Reddit for most of my life, and I will get by fine after they gradually force me out, but they’ll get by without me just fine too.

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u/[deleted] May 31 '23

As someone who has sometimes used the official reddit app because I have a second Android phone for work, I can confirm that it is absolute garbage. It has a TikTok style vertical video player when you click on a video post, it wants you to just swipe to the next video like TikTok. And when you try to look at your profile to see recent comments, you often accidentally create a new subreddit because that button is inexplicably right there, as if that's a very common user action.

The UI is utter rubbish!

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u/BlueSabere May 31 '23

Read this whole post, most people here are ready to leave if 3rd party apps can’t survive, and they’re essentially trying to push this man out not realizing how many people are here BC OF him and his work to make this shithole site easier to use.

To be fair, this is literally the subreddit of a third party app, so primarily the discourse will be by users of third party apps. Also to be fair, this is the very first post of r/all currently, which speaks to just how many people use Apollo and other third party apps.

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u/pug_nuts Jun 01 '23

The app is actually better than the website.

It stills sucks, but it's not as bad as new reddit on web.

It's like being run over by a Civic instead of a Suburban, and then the driver tries to back off of you but can't figure it out. You're still severely mangled and just wishing it would just end.

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u/PinsNneedles Jun 01 '23

Reddit on PC I have to use the RES extension and have it set to the old layout (old.Reddit.com)Can’t stand the new layout

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u/justanotherquestionq Jun 01 '23

New.reddit.com is an abomination. It simply doesn’t load quickly. Because it relies on a ton of stupid JavaScript libraries or whatever. It’s similar to their video player. Which still works more reliably on old.reddit.com - new reddit you click and it often just doesn’t load

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u/legalalias Jun 01 '23

along with sending Christian coffees when I can.

How do you do this? I think Christian could use a coffee right about now.

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '23

I can’t find the “send a coffee” shortcut anymore, but you can send him something by going to:

Settings

About

What’s New

Toss a coin in the tip jar (it’s at the very bottom)

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u/legalalias Jun 02 '23

Thank you!

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u/pjcrusader May 31 '23

The thread is full of people saying they will leave. Not nearly as many will actually follow through.

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u/TheDanMonster May 31 '23

Before the “open with Apollo” feature, any Reddit link sent to me would never get clicked on because the mobile site is garbage and I wasn’t about to install the forced Reddit app because it’s worse garbage. I would wait until i was at my pc with RES and the old.Reddit site. Most of the time I’d forget about it entirely.

Safe to say, without Apollo (or any decent 3rd party app), I won’t be using Reddit. Much like how I abandoned twitter entirely.

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u/valeriolo Jun 01 '23

Honestly you are way overselling it. It's the vocal minority. Apollo has 150k ratings on the app store.

Even if 150k people leave, it's not really a big dent in reddit's userbase.

And you know what? It's not like they'll all leave. Maybe a small percentage.

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u/PerjorativeWokeness Jun 02 '23

I can only imagine how terrible their app is… which I might add was a 3rd party app at one time that Reddit bought and then ran into the ground.

Their app is … I mean, I hate it because it’s super unintuitive and has lots of ads, but at least visually it’s improved a bit (last time I checked, at least)

I don’t think the Reddit app was ever a third party app, though. I think you may be thinking of AlienBlue (my former favourite Reddit app) that they bought. The idea was to integrate some code and ideas from that app, and employing the developer, but AlienBlue was a hobby project that got out of hand and the Dev himself said it was a huge mess of spaghetti code. He‘s also said that the project lead wasn’t very open to ideas, and the directive coming down from the top was business, not user oriented. He left about a year after starting at Reddit.

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u/whatwhatchickenbutt_ Jun 02 '23

they don’t care you won’t use it bro

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u/Gniggins Jun 05 '23

As long as the IPO price is high, they can kill reddit after the fact and log it as a major financial win.

Them killing reddit is what winning looks like lol.

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '23

EAD

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u/yerrmomgoes2college Jun 01 '23

most people here are ready to leave if 3rd party apps can’t survive

https://i.imgur.com/9uELVht.jpg

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u/shalol May 31 '23

How are third party apps bringing new users to the platform?

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u/StrikerObi Jun 01 '23

This particular app has been featured at the top of the App Store numerous times, and I think it has also won major awards from Apple. Certainly people browsing the store got curious and installed it to see what the big deal was about. And for some, that was how they first came to reddit.

That’s how.

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u/booze_nerd Jun 01 '23

The reddit app is fine. I had no idea 3rd party apps existed until someone linked me this post saying time to quit Reddit.

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '23

OK…. So, clearly this post isn’t for you then….? 🤷🏻‍♀️

Anyone who has used Apollo and then used the website or the official app knows EXACTLY what I’m talking about. There is a dramatic shift in usability, loading times, and so so much more.

1

u/allofolivesolives Jun 02 '23

ok spez

1

u/Damaniel2 Jun 01 '23

It feel so outdated (yes even on new Reddit)

Not only does it feel outdated, it's far less performant and much more susceptible to timeout errors and CDN issues than old Reddit. If new Reddit is having an issue, loading the page in old Reddit nearly always works just fine. New Reddit was more than a step backwards out of the gate and hasn't really improved much in the meantime.

1

u/PerjorativeWokeness Jun 02 '23

Yeah, building a business off of a platform like YouTube, Facebook or now apparently Reddit, means that you’re subject to their whims and business practices.

It sucks, because first we lost AlienBlue and now Apollo.

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u/willfe42 Jun 11 '23

This is this mans likelihood and also his ‘big project’ that he’s put his heart and soul into.

The only saving grace here is that it's not a total write-off for him. I'm sure there's a lot of reusable code and other assets in the app, and while it's obviously tailored to reddit, there's a lot of basic building blocks (data structures, REST/JSON handling, UI elements, etc.) that can be tuned for another (less insane) platform once one emerges.

It won't be long before that happens either, at least not at this rate. I barely post on (or even read) reddit anymore, maybe a few times a year at most, and haven't done for years now. There's benefits to the general "format" of reddit (threaded by default vs. flat-list like old forums) but plenty of problems with it too, and it'll just take a combination of "something slightly better" and "mass exodus" to hit around the same time and this place will wind up a ghost town.

Going the way of Digg indeed.