this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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No, reddit demanded ludicrously high fees at barely 30 days notice. It gave nobody any time at all to figure out alternative monetization strategies. Many of the third party apps had expressed their willingness to pay, but that was just absurd
Most of these apps had subscriptions already in place. All they had to do was remove the free access and maybe increase the subscription price a bit to $5/month (I'm not sure what they were charging before).
They also had ads, which they'd no longer gain revenue from. Ads can pull in $3-5 per month per user. That's a massive loss.
They could still have ads.
Not if you remove free access. That's a great way to lose your entire user base.
Apart from the ones that pay. You only need to look at any of the sync posts on here to see there are many, many of them.
Ad revenue very often dwarfs the income from subscribing users by a huge margin. Sure, a single user subscribing pays for themselves plus a little extra, but your free users make up 70-80% of your revenue
Sure, but again - removing the app takes away 100% of the revenue. Keeping it as subscription only gets you some revenue. Some > none.
The amount of people that subscribe would likely not pay for the ongoing maintenance costs unless he's willing to work for shit pay. Every hour he puts into maintenance is an hour he didn't put into maintenance the other version that actually pays well enough
There aren't necessarily ongoing maintenance costs.
No program ever created has never needed any bug fixing or improvement. That's the nature of software engineering.
Sync for Reddit wasn’t just created yesterday. There comes a point where almost all software is stable and will run be fine without updates indefinitely. Established Reddit clients were at that point years ago.
That must be why Sync has been pretty consistently updated for a decade.
Just because it has doesn't mean it needed to be.
If I earned enough money from a product to be able to only work on it, I'd update it too - but that doesn't mean it needs updates or maintenance.
And that's exactly how businesses become complacent and get overtaken by new players in the market
These are reddit clients mate lol.
It doesn't make a difference what part of the market a business lies in, it's still a competitive market