Apollo, Popular Reddit App, To Shut Down June 30 Following API Price Surge

Posted by msmash

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  by TheSimkin ( 639033 ) on Thursday June 08, 2023 @01:45PM (#63586208)

  Instead of just deleting the api token what if you set it up so users can supply their own tokens? This way users will cover their own api usage costs while being able to use your tools.

  • Re:

    That's an interesting idea...

  • Re:

    Because that wouldn't be dramatic and poke a stick in they eye of Reddit for their idiocy.

  • by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Thursday June 08, 2023 @02:13PM (#63586288)

    In your solution is the user inputs a key; in reddit proposal, Apollo just owns one key, or in an intermediate solution Apollo mediates the purchase of the key. IN the end it's equivalent to: Apollo continuing normal operations and invoicing the API costs to each of the users. Presumably only a small fraction of the users are willing to pay for the service and Apollo won't be able to make money in any of those cases. They're probably not interested in keeping the tool alive if they can't extract money off it.

    • Re:

      Regardless of the order in which the money is moved around, this would be fair if the price per request was actually reasonable. $0.25 per 1000 API calls. Billing individual users would be 'fair', but also make it unapproachable for many people's normal use. Averaging out the cost would make it uneconomical for light users.
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    • Re:

      In your solution is the user inputs a key; in reddit proposal, Apollo just owns one key, or in an intermediate solution Apollo mediates the purchase of the key. IN the end it's equivalent to: Apollo continuing normal operations and invoicing the API costs to each of the users. Presumably only a small fraction of the users are willing to pay for the service and Apollo won't be able to make money in any of those cases. They're probably not interested in keeping the tool alive if they can't extract money off i

    • Re: just an idea

      From recent info released, itâ(TM)s got very little to do with the API itself, and more that Reddit is charging for âopportunity costâ(TM) of users eyeballs.

      The Apollo developer was willing to make the changes require and set up monthly billing, but had 30 days to make all the changes. He stated that it simply wasnâ(TM)t possible.
      Redditâ(TM)s actions are a red herring - theyâ(TM)re intentionally trying to kill 3rd party apps full stop.

  • Re:

    I doubt many people would want to pay $2k/month for a developer account plus extra for the API calls.
    Reddit disallows "sub-letting" access to an API key, so that monthly developer account cost can't easily be spread around, that would be for each individual user.

    Regardless, he open sourced the app and released it on github.
    If there really is enough interest by enough people to make it worthwhile, someone will do it.

  • Re:

    This is a solution in search of a problem.

    This assumes there are enough people who can afford $20 million/year to have their own token to make maintaining Apollo worthwhile.

    That assumption would be incorrect.

    • Re:

      It is not $20M for the API Token, it is based on usage. So if Apollo has the same usage over the next year as they had over the last year, it would cost them $20M. If each user supplied their own token, it would probably only cost them $5-10/year to use Apollo. Perhaps there's even a free tier if your usage is low enough.

• Reddit, Youtube, Twitter... They've all been haemorraging money for years, if not decades now. The problem is, if they try to monetize their user base, they'll kill it. If they don't, they'll kill themselves.

  Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

  They all started with the idea of grabbing as much presence as possible as fast as possible to reach a critical mass of monetizable users, and now they realize the users are addicted to free and aren't monetizable. Worse, the younger ones have never known anything else, so they're even more unlikely to fork over any money.

  If I was an investor in any of those companies, I'd pull the plug. It's high time.

  • Reddit is killing themselves. They've been sitting around with a thumb up their ass instead of developing the official app (or even having one) or adding QoL features to the site. 3rd party developers should have been bought out/hired ages ago, instead they were asleep at the wheel. Now the actual adults from wall street are walking up the driveway and they're clumsily trying to hide their bongs and porn mags while desperately fanning out the marijuana smoke.

  • Re:

    The business plan from The Underpants Gnomes [youtube.com] - like most of the tech industry for the last couple of decades - and now that the economy is in the crapper, it's time for Phase Two, with predictable results.

  • Unfortunately they're coming to the realization, which was obvious to many that their content isn't actually worth money, and it's only useful as a past time, or an advertising platform. There's too much junk now so ads are devalued since people aren't racing to buy ads for all crappy knock off cheap products that ore overpriced and here we are.

    Sometime people are willing to throw a few bucks to an individual who really made their day by their video, or antics online playing video games, but as a whole, pay for youtube? No I don't care about most of it, and usually I just toss it on because I'm bored and it's free. If it wasn't free? I'd probably just go for a walk, that's free and can provide just as much entertainment. These companies are competing with a ton of perfectly free ways to entertain yourself when you have some spare time. It won't work.

    • Re:

      Pretty much. It's why sponsor segments are now approaching 2 minutes in a video. A 5 to 10-second segment would likely be more effective, since viewers likely wouldn't bother to skip over them, but no... content creators just rave on and on, under the impression that longer ads make them more effective. Then they pin their own comments to post another ad, because spamming your own comment section is totally going to earn a few more precious cents. Do you hate me pinning my own comments? Post a comment

  • Re:

    I believe you on Reddit and Twitter, but citation needed for Youtube. It looks like Google doesn't break out costs vs revenues so no one knows for sure, but my impression is that Youtube is likely a profit center.

    https://www.tubics.com/blog/yo... [tubics.com] - "In 2015 some unnamed person at Google reportedly said to the Wall Street Journal that YouTube is "roughly break-even. Many things have changed since then. Despite the huge content acquisition and infrastructure costs YouTube probably is profitable by 2021 with $

    • Re:

      The above post also (correctly) did not mention Facebook, since it makes a ton of money - a working example of the "grow now, monetize later" strategy.

    • Re:

      This is exactly how I know Youtube doesn't make Google any money: if it did, Google would boast about it right and left.

      When a company doesn't itemize one of their divisions' revenues, it means they're not proud of it and they don't want people to know. When a division is profitable, they sure don't miss an opportunity to tell you. And Google doesn't.

  • Sustainable if they embrace P2P technologies

    There is no reason most of these services cannot simply act as directories and superpeers for improving access to information, all while letting end users do all the heavy lifting for free. All these services need to do is embrace decent P2P technology which is already tried, tested and true,

  • Re:

    They are protecting their content so that it's not fed into AI training models for free, allowing that AI to monetize their data while leaving them out. AI training data is a very valuable, hot commodity nowadays.
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• • Apollo offers a subscription option and the developer has already indicated that even if he applied all of that to the reddit 'charges', it wouldn't be enough. This is obviously based on the current number of users that pay for a subscription. Will thousands and thousands of users switch from the free version to subscription ? I really doubt it.
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    • • It's going to cost $20mil a year to run Apollo with the current API pricing. It's not sustainable. Reddit is killing themselves like Digg did.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08, 2023 @03:05PM (#63586402)

        You should read the blog post linked in the summary, it's all explained.

        $20 a month wouldn't cover costs.
        Reddit's API costs are $40/user/month, then the $2k/month developer account cost would spread out to another $25/user.

        Then if he wants to *get* 65/month, you have to add in apple's in-app subscription fee, another $13 (it's still 20%, right?)

        So he would have to charge $78/month to cover costs and make nothing.
        This also assumes all 50k users would remain paying customers at that rate.
        If only half keep the app, double the costs to $156/month to each user.

        Also he tried working out a deal with reddit, numerous ones. Reddit ghosted him.
        Reddit also refuses to budge on the 30 day deadline. They won't give him time to change the app and get the update pushed to the app store before the $2million/month fees begin.

        You're asking him to eat $2m/month in fees to "work out a deal" with a company that refuses to respond to him, instead of eating $125k once in current subscription refunds.
        That's just unsound business.

        • Re:

          >Reddit's API costs are $40/user/month, then the $2k/month developer account cost would spread out to another $25/user.
          
          Where does the additional $25/user come from? If it's $2k/month for the developer account, and the number of users is 50k as you indicated elsewhere, that'd be $0.04/user.
          
          In Apollo's author's Reddit post detailing the problems he says the average cost incurred per user would be $2.50 per month, which is 20 times more than the revenue generated per user for him. He complains that even i

          • Re:

            In Apollo's author's Reddit post detailing the problems he says the average cost incurred per user would be $2.50 per month, which is 20 times more than the revenue generated per user for him.

            Thanks for some real numbers, I had not seen his reddit post.

            So what I am saying, is that Apollo should have mandated all users go subscription, at a level that would cover the Apple fee + some extra to keep Apollo running as well... it doesn't sound like it would have been a massive cost to users, yeah Apollo would ha

        • Re:

          Apple's commission is 30%. In many jurisdictions, certainly pretty much everywhere else outside the US, Apple is required to pay sales tax / VAT / whatever over to the local tax authority.

          So, for example, a £100 subscription in the UK:
          £16.67 goes to HMRC in VAT
          £25 goes to Apple for their commission
          The developer receives £58.33

  • Re:

    he wrote a (really) huge wall of text cited in tfa explaining all this in excruciating detail (but many inconsistencies imo), my take on it:

    1. because he was indirectly piggybacking his business on reddit's investor money, just like reddit does: he claims that the stated price would mean $2 million a month for him. that would imply around 24 million users at the stated average of 345 requests a day. if that's true, with only 50.000 of those users paying subscription that clearly can't work. if it isn't (and

  • Re:

    Because you're paying more for less. They're removing a significant chunk of the content from the API as part of the change
• Too much of the internet concentrated in a few websites, and when those websites go rogue all the content goes with it. Reddit is the new Digg/Myspace. Other big sites like Wikipedia and Imgur are also collapsing under their own weight due to the server's hearts not keeping up with the obesity of the content. The whole internet is going to be AI generated in the future anyway, so it is not worth saving.
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  • Re:

    The problem isn't too much of the internet concentrated in a few websites, the problem is idiots building a business model that assumes free access to it forever.

    The stupidity there isn't in the few web sites.

  • Re:

    Agreed. I've gone back to RSS feeds for what good blogs and news sites are left out there. I'm sick of these tech companies just changing the way things work on a whim. Self hosted and small web from here on out.

• This sounds just like when Google Maps did the same thing, charging sites that used their API. A number of sites switched to openstreetmap.org, but it's not like there's an equivalent alternative here.

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  • Not yet...

    Not yet but now there is a clear motivation for one that will probably change.

    • Re:

      Apple showed us what it takes to throw off google maps. They pulled it off but it wasn't easy or cheap.

  • • Re:

      It's a poor substitute due to the comparatively minuscule user base, but I've been enjoying it. It's also neat that it's federated.
      
      In reality I think I'll end up using a few different sites if reddit goes to shit. Hence me being back here after a long hiatus.

  • Re:

    > but it's not like there's an equivalent alternative here.

    NNTP?

• The old rule for journalists used to be who, what, where, why, and when. Now it seems to be, throw shit at the wall.

  It would be nice if someone could identify what Apollo does or is used for since not everyone knows.

• I appreciate that on the surface it looks like monetizing, but if someone could figure out a way to make $20 million+ on Reddit's API access, wouldn't Reddit already be doing it?

  This looks like a lockdown of their API with a false shruggy shoulders of "Whelp! We tried to compromise!".

  Not unlike Twitter.

• Is worth what they paid for it.

• • Drag the Whopper into the bag

    Parsing the website is unlikely to help once Reddit introduces CAPTCHA to post.

• Seems like with a couple months notice the big apps like Apollo and RIF could have come together to clone the last open source update of the Reddit backend and then allow for auto-crossposting between platforms until the June 30, then switch over to the new platform. They would have a month or so of content to kickstart it and a lot of users willing to switch.

  • Re: Alternate Reddit

    Christian (the Apollo developer) discussed that and said that it wasnâ(TM)t really his cup of tea. He enjoys making the product, not managing a beast. Fair enough.