I am not a native speaker but I first read the transcript and then listened to the audio. It sounds like a Good Fellas dialogue. To my non-businesses ears you don't propose a $10m deal for things to go quietly, even in terms of API usage. It makes no sense. I don't see where's the leverage in that unless quiet refer to "no fuss from me" because Reddit could legally just close the API without paying the dev. If Reddit were to give even a dollar to the dev for Apolo to slowly go away and with the promise the dev wouldn't make a fuss about it that would be extortion right ?
> If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too.
Again, I am not a native speaker and I havent' listened to the whole conversation just that segment, maybe there were other attempts like that at humor ?
> From reading the transcript it reads to me that Reddit says Apollo is costing them $20 mil a year from lost opportunity cost, which I take to mean advertising/tracking et? The Apollo dev seems skeptical of that cost and is jokingly suggesting that if they cut him a $10 mil check, they can make it up in 6 months purely from getting that "opportunity" back with the added benefit Apollo just disappears.
> I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
Could be but there are no laugh or tone that suggests the dev is joking or half-joking, there no audio cues that suggests "hey, it's a joke" but maybe it's the end of a 3 hours long talk and fatigue adds up and the joke really fell flat (edit: listening again, I can hear audio cues in the dev speech pattern at the end that indicates the intent to joke).
Jeez, and they made those TV shows about courts and crimes and lawyers look so easy to spot liars, jokers, innoncents, culprits :D.
> Again, why would they pay him half the current operating cost to go away (even if that is not 20 mill)?
Again, the insinuation was that if anything was actually costing them the absurd $20,000,000 per year for multiple years then they would have had equally absurd ways of dealing with it, like paying a ridiculous $10,000,000 for Apollo and still saving tens of millions of dollars, which would have made more sense to do than what they did (let it go for years). The most obvious interpretation of this is "So obviously it's not costing you that absurdly, and we all know it. Now stop jerking me around on this API price being 'reasonable'." not "And that's why I'm asking you to actually pay me $10,000,000 to go away".
> Also weird to release audio publicly based on hear-say, the Steve guy didn't accuse him publicly of anything.
It's not just private hearsay, the two quotes attributed to Steve are from the moderation call transcript which has been shared and verified.
> I'd be very careful to be on the phone with this Christian guy, because, I might also "miss" (did he mention it at any point to the other guy?) that he is recording the conversation.
I'd be worried about talking to someone who feels the need to be careful when they know the call is recorded.
> Just at a glance, and maybe I'm reading it wrong, but this appears to be issuing six requests every five seconds:
I don't believe any of these six operations make any calls to the Reddit API whatsoever. If that's correct, the fact that you raised this as a possible area to optimize indicates to me that you aren't qualified to make any judgments at all about what Apollo could or could not do to reduce its API usage.
> On March 14th, Apollo made nearly 1 billion requests against our API in a single day, triggered in part by our system outage. After the outage, Apollo started making 53% fewer calls per day. If the app can operate with half the daily request volume, can it operate with fewer?
Maybe I'm stupid but I'm not really following how this open-ended speculation indicates that it would be possible for them to operate under the new oppressive API pricing scheme without paying a single cent. Can you please clarify?
> To date I've seen no logic that shows how any of reddit/spezs actions will actually increase profit.
I think you assume that the only people using it are shutting down while obivously there are lots of profitable companies using the API who will obivously be fine with paying $0.24 per 1,000 API requests.
Then there is obivously OpenAI and other AI based companies that are really the main reason for the change.
Realistically, having Apollo, etc not there drives people to use the main app. Saying that people won't switch over seems naive. There will be some that won't be realistically the vast majority probably will. And those users then go back into monetization drives. Which will increase revenues.
> If nobody is demanding free API access, why has the “movement” not put out a counteroffer for pricing that they’d be happy with?
I don't think this "movement" of third-party client developers is as organized as you think it is, but the Apollo developer did mention discussing pricing with Reddit here[1] and compared Reddit's API pricing to Imgur. Note that he never mentioned any expectation of "free", just that it was about 100x more expensive. I'm really not sure why you can't accept their intentions as being truthful or valid.
>My belief is that it’s because if they announce a number that is not $0, then everyone is going to find out that a lot of people are demanding free API access.
That sounds extremely unrealistic to me, but you don't have any evidence to support this so I'm not sure what else there is to say about it.
> “Reddit is killing 3rd-party apps” is a disingenuous statement.
It's not, because once they are forced to pass on the costs to their customers they will certainly lose a significant percentage of them. It's impossible to say exactly how many, but it's reasonable to assume that it could cost enough to make their app no longer viable. Again, not sure why that is so hard to believe.
> Is any app even planning to charge the new prices? If they don’t, then they’re killing themselves.
I'm not sure I understand this comment. Obviously all third party clients will be forced to pass on these costs to their customers if they go in to effect because they won't have a choice. I mean, it's so obvious that I'm not even sure why you are mentioning it.
>Honestly it’s a great campaign by the app makers to whip users up into a frenzy like this because it means more profit for themselves if Reddit backs down on the API pricing.
I'm completely baffled as to why you are unable to see this from the point of view of the app developer. Just put yourself in their shoes - if a critical dependency of yours started charging X times what they were charging before, it throws off your entire business plan and may make it no longer viable. Are you saying you wouldn't do anything to try and prevent that from happening before you had to change your whole business plan around in an attempt to stave off what will very likely be the death of your company?
>Opportunity cost essentially means lost revenue. They (Reddit) aren't referring to server/egress/cloud/etc. costs. Eliminating lost revenue = new revenue
Sure, but that doesn't mean buying/owning apollo helps them eliminate that lost revenue. They eliminate lost revenue when Apollo stops existing, not when they buy it. What is the point of buying it if you dont want it to exist?
Take 2 options:
A> Buy Apollo for $10M, Apollo shuts down, 20M new revenue
B> Don't buy Apollo, Apollo shuts down, 20M new revenue
Spending $10M doesn't stop the losses, Apollo shutting down does.
> a paid model that it would be at a reasonable cost
What does this even mean? "Reasonable" is subjective - and from Reddit's perspective, I'd bet they believe the fees are reasonable.
It's on the business operator to mitigate risk. Apollo didn't do that - and is now throwing in the towel instead of charging their customer's more.
> set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.
Apollo has had since April to figure out a new billing model - but sat on their hands hoping whatever Reddit came up with could be afforded with their existing $10 per year per user model. Say it out loud - it's absurd.
> Apollo has had since April to figure out a new billing model - but sat on their hands hoping whatever Reddit came up with could be afforded with their existing $10 per year per user model. Say it out loud - it's absurd.
Just stop.
You’ve been told multiple times, by multiple people, that this was not the case.
You’ve been provided the timeline, which you refuse to acknowledge.
You very well know that he was not provided the pricing until 8 days ago.
At this point, you continuing to say this is just being disingenuous and talking in bad faith.
What, exactly, are you getting out of this? Is unreasonably placing the blame on a single developer your way of getting your rocks off?
> So what if Apollo charged $6 per month [...] If only a third of those users paid, that would be over $350,000 per month. [...] I don’t know what the operating costs are for Apollo
Total nonsense. If you increase the price of something from $0 to $72/year, you are not going to keep "a third" of your users, especially when free alternatives exist (the official reddit app, using tiktok or whatever instead).
> doubt. the backend was open sourced to dispel this rumor.
how its even relevant? Now that backend with unproven track record and unknown quality needs to handle petabytes of reddit data under significant load and with low latency.
you can just do the math I proposed to do above: mau visits site few times a month, apollo users generate 250 reqs every day, how we can come to just 5x difference here?
> Salaries are a fixed cost
its fixed but significant and adds to final number.
>Well pretty much all the successful apps have decided to shut down but perhaps you know something they don’t and you can profit from their ignorance.
I won't profit because I don't have an app. But all the other third party apps that won't shut down will just start charging and power users will pay for them, because they are better than the official website and app.
>Here’s Apollos developers thoughts:
The thoughts are fundamentally flawed. They're saying their owe existing users a service and can't charge them more for using the app. But... they're suggesting they will just refund them anyway. So, why can't they refund all users that are paying for Apollo and then reintroduce a subscription model. Those 50,000 that paid for Apollo beforehand will most likely renew their subscription that covers the Reddit API charges and nothing changes.
> They knew no app was going to pay those astronomical rates
Perhaps, but they don't have much choice. If the apps paid a reasonable rate with respect to what is reasonable to app developers, Reddit would still go bankrupt. May as well go big and go bankrupt only if that fails then not try and be guaranteed to go bankrupt.
Thing is, Apollo is on board to pay the big price, but Christian has exclaimed he needs more time to make the necessary changes to support it. Problem is that Reddit doesn't have that much time. Bankruptcy is still inevitable on his needed timeline. The power company doesn't care that you plan to make money sometime in the future when developers have had time to get around to making changes to their software. They want their money when they want it and if you can't make good then and there, that's it.
Remember, they're panicking. Their old model of finding new investment every time the plug was about to be pulled is dead and they weren't expecting that. They need legitimate cashflow now and don't know where else to find it on short notice.
Next will be a massive layoff to follow the small layoff earlier this week to address the haemorrhaging on the expense side. The "everything will be okay in a few days" notice sent to employees today indicates that something "not okay" is coming.
> This is subjective. He's basically saying he's willing to pay an amount that fit into his old, not well thought out business model, and it's up to Reddit to pay for the rest.
That's not what he said. He said that it's not feasible to transfer from the current pricing with 30 days notice.
That choice is entirely on Reddit, the situation did not demand such a short notice period. They could have smoothed it out but chose not to.
I find it strange to push the blame onto someone who was assured by Reddit of their intention to charge a reasonable price, and to work with 3rd parties on a flexible timeline for the introduction of the charges.
The worst I can say about the Apollo developer is that he believed Reddit were acting in good faith. Reddit on the other hand look like incompetent arseholes.
Agree, but the parent comment was coming across as it's a "cut and run" situation.
For anyone curious about what he said on trying to run everything as a paid sub quickly:
> One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That's $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.
> So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users.
> I hope you can recognize how that's an enormous amount of money to suddenly start incurring with 30 days notice. Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even.
> Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible. It's much cheaper for me to simply shut down.
> It costs us about $10 million in pure infrastructure costs to support these apps. But it’s not labor, that’s not R&D, that’s not safety, that’s not ML, and that doesn’t include the lost monetization of having users not on our platform. Just pure cloud spend. It’s real money.
He’s saying that it costs them $10M/year in “pure cloud spend” to serve 3% of their users. Despite what they say, if you look at requests, it’s obvious that Apollo is more efficient than Reddit’s app. So if he’s telling the truth, that extrapolates to at least $333M of “pure cloud spend” to serve all of their users.
> He said he could make the pricing work at half what reddit is asking, for $1.26/mo base API cost.
He said a much more reasonable thing would be to cut the price in half and give a 3 month transition period to make it "feasible for more developers, myself included."
> However in a perfect world I think lowering the price by half and providing a three month transition period to the paid API would make the transition feasible for more developers, myself included. These concessions seem minor and reasonable in the face of the changes.
What that would likely mean is removing as many API calls as possible and removing features as a result. Which means fewer users would want to pay for it.
> I was just spitballing that doubling his revenue would mean he could manage the price Reddit is asking (since he said he could make due with half).
Also, as a tidbit. His current subscription pricing is $5/mo for ultra.
If we want to take that as his revenue for an ongoing subscription to double (since API access is going to be monthly), then the app would be $10/mo or $120/yr.
> If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I'm just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too.
Again, I am not a native speaker and I havent' listened to the whole conversation just that segment, maybe there were other attempts like that at humor ?
edit: just read that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36248834
> From reading the transcript it reads to me that Reddit says Apollo is costing them $20 mil a year from lost opportunity cost, which I take to mean advertising/tracking et? The Apollo dev seems skeptical of that cost and is jokingly suggesting that if they cut him a $10 mil check, they can make it up in 6 months purely from getting that "opportunity" back with the added benefit Apollo just disappears.
> I look at less of a threat and more of a calling the bluff...
Could be but there are no laugh or tone that suggests the dev is joking or half-joking, there no audio cues that suggests "hey, it's a joke" but maybe it's the end of a 3 hours long talk and fatigue adds up and the joke really fell flat (edit: listening again, I can hear audio cues in the dev speech pattern at the end that indicates the intent to joke).
Jeez, and they made those TV shows about courts and crimes and lawyers look so easy to spot liars, jokers, innoncents, culprits :D.
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