this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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The boost dev in his whinge post about the new costs said that his revenue was in the millions of dollars a year. His costs are……his time. There’s no way the other devs for apps like sync and RiF also didn’t make millions.
Also Reddit the company doesn’t care about third party app devs leeching off their product. They cost them money. They don’t give them anything in return. That’s why they started charging for the api. 30 days is more than enough to simply increase your existing subscription costs and remove free access. I say this as a developer myself. That’s a half a day job at most, including taking a nap.
You may be a developer, but you clearly don't know how the businesses side actually functions, especially if you're self employed. You remove free access and you lose hundreds of thousands of users and millions of ad impressions, as well as plummeting user acquisition since people don't buy apps. The subscription they had at the time couldnt (or barely could) cover API access. If you start charging more, you lose more users, and you also have to refund anyone that doesn't like the increased price. You'd be lucky to keep any whole percentage of your userbase.
If it's your sole source of income, your expenses are very likely to be largely inflexible. You're telling me you could handle a 30 days notice to cut spending by nearly 100% while also scrambling to figure out how to completely change your monetization in a sustainable way? What if you have a mortgage? Car payments? Other loans?
It's not as simple as flicking a switch. Even sole proprietors plan out their business 6-10 months or a year+ in advance. Giving them 30 days notice is telling them you don't want them to exist in the first place under the guise of generosity.
You’re overlooking the fact that these apps don’t cost these people more than their time to maintain. They don’t have hosting costs. The costs are literally the devs time, that’s it.
Would they make less money going subscription only? Absolutely. Would they lose money? Absolutely not. Completely removing the app means they make even less money - $0 in fact.
Most of these apps already had subscriptions. It would be a config value or database change to update the price for new subscriptions, and one line of code to only allow users that have a subscription to use the app.
Also if your entire livelihood relies on making your entire business off the back of a free api to someone else’s business, you can’t complain. When this happens. Your business model is bad, and then cutting off your access is a known risk.
More than their time to maintain? Do you have any idea how expensive a developer's time is? He could easily be making 120 or 200k a year with his talents
You absolutely can. When this business has made zero fuss about it for more than a decade and has even welcomed them with open arms, even having meetings with them directly on many occasions, then YES you CAN complain when they suddenly do a 180 without any warning.
I do, I am one. A change to go subscription only in an app that already has subscriptions is a one line code change essentially. Changing the price of subscriptions isn't even than, it's a config or db change.
The Boost guy made literal millions from reddit. The sync guy is probably the same based on how many people shill it.
A one line code change but community backlash and basically no new users coming onto the platform is a slow death sentence
Community backlash? Not sure you've been paying attention lol. Also Boost/Sync/etc aren't a "platform", they're an app to access a platform.
I've been paying plenty of attention. If sync had raised priced to keep operating on Reddit, the users who don't give a shit or know about the API price increase (which is realistically a large number of them) would blame Sync, not Reddit. People are idiots.
Most would rightfully stop using it, which would cause ad revenue to plummet, and would very likely make ongoing development of it infeasible since its his full-time job to maintain it.
And whatever. The specific word I used is irrelevant to my point so I don't see why it's necessary to be pedantic about it.
Again though - some money > no money. By literally shutting the app down it makes no money.
Ongoing development of sync is only a full time job because it paid so well with zero costs since Reddit handed the content and api to the dev for free. It’s definitely not an actual full time jobs worth of work.
I'm sure reddit has exactly zero engineers who work exclusively on the app every day. /s
From the way people that love Sync etc talk about the official reddit app they likely don't.