I think the $0.12 figure that was calculated on the post may have been too low.
Iirc, the entirety of Reddit’s user base was used for the calculation. My guess is that Apollo’s subset of users are much more active (and probably more lucrative in terms of ads and user data) than probably 99% of all Reddit users.
> Reddit will be worse for lurkers if Apollo users disappear
Within the realm of folks who are willing to pay for a Reddit skin, imagine that very few of them will just give up the site once their skin is gone.
More likely is that someone comes in and makes a similar app and charges more for it. Power users and professional users will pay, and most of them will gladly pay a premium.
Not gonna lie… I think op said he charged $10 a year. I raised my eyebrows… that should probably be the bottom option of a three-tier monthly price matrix.
I think someone should buy this app and just price it properly based on value add. Im not sure what the various user profiles of Apollo are, but my guess is that there are a few profiles that can be profitably monetized even with the new Reddit API charges. Imho, Reddit is being shortsighted, but they do have a unique and large community.
> I'm so annoyed with three-tier monthly price matrices. It's honestly a red flag for me at this point.
On an aesthetic level, I agree with you. For some business, it’s just not needed.
That said…
As someone who has optimized pricing matrixes many times, I will just say that it works incredibly well. Also, for the whatever number people (like you? sort of like me?) who drop out due to “red flags”, there are legions more who allow their behavior to be shaped in an incredibly profitable way.
Yeah, I'd expect a lot of power users on the 3rd party clients are generating a lot of the content and doing free moderation that produces the product they can get the masses to use via the website/ official app.
It was already a calculation with massively generous values — come on, hardware serving easily cache-able data is dirt cheap, especially when quite a lot of that is just text. And there is data from Christian about the average daily API calls an Apollo user makes, so no need to guess.
Iirc, the entirety of Reddit’s user base was used for the calculation. My guess is that Apollo’s subset of users are much more active (and probably more lucrative in terms of ads and user data) than probably 99% of all Reddit users.