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Looks like theres a final surprise in the form of a song in Apollo now that it’s closed.
Can anyone identify the artist?
EDIT: someone managed to find it. From Christian’s YouTube page:
A fun parody of Sarah McLachlan's I Will Remember You performed by the incredible Zoe Wynns
Glad this is downvoted. It takes way more than a couple of hours to completely change your apps backend to read from a completely different website’s API. And that’s not even thinking of how complicated dealing with the fediverse is, dealing with multiple domains and logging in through multiple fediverses.
The guy doesn’t owe you anything. Please be quiet.
I recommended his app to people, I paid for the subscription, I left a positive review on the appstore. I was a loyal user for a long time.
In the end, he tried (and fortunately failed) to sell Apollo to reddit, then just killed the app when that didn’t work. If he did care about users (aka the people that made him a lot of money), he could’ve sold the app to someone willing to continue it, or at least released it as open source.
It’s not the end of the world, and he didn’t eat a newborn baby or anything like that, but I don’t think people should be patting this guy on the back for the way he handled this. He just took the money and ran, abandoning his customers in the process. That’s not the type of business I want to support.
It’s not that hard to understand that the price he pitched to Reddit was simply a way to show how outrageous it was. All he did was simply say okay you are charging me x per month so then you are evaluating my app at x dollars. Since the amount he offered was very low compared to “long term evaluation” just to show how stupid they are.
So what this dude didn’t sell off his app to someone else? He has been making that app for a decade. If he was just trying to sell it like you’re implying then he easily could have. He was making a point.
Imagine you worked on something you loved for a decade and then out of nowhere it got ripped out from under you and it wasn’t usable or financially responsible to keep it going. Would you just go off and sell whatever it was or be like “hmm… maybe I should keep this since I’ve spent so many years on it and adored it. I could also just take a step back and relax before thinking about a way I could make it work”.
It’s this thing called having empathy for other people and understanding how having something like that happen could discourage you and make you want to just take a bit to yourself without immediately thinking about the next step.
Don’t make sense why you are so up in arms about people having empathy and respecting the decisions the dev made.
What most people missed, much less understood, from that interaction is that Reddit justified the API cost based on “opportunity cost”.
This means that Reddit was saying that they weren’t trying to kill off third party apps but that they simply were trying to charge $20MM/y to recoup the earnings they’re losing out on by virtue of people using Apollo instead of Reddit’s own offerings.
So yeah, like you said, he clearly tried to call BS on the price motivation by essentially saying “if my mere existence is causing you to lose out on $20MM/y of earnings, why don’t you cut a check for $10MM to buy Apollo”.
Because logically if it really was about opportunity cost and the pricing of $20MM/y would accurately reflect that, then a one time $10MM purchase would be such a steal compared to losing $20MM/y, it would have any CEO scrambling to sign a check the moment the option was even so much as whispered.
Instead the API pricing was simply a ploy to kill off third party apps and the “opportunity cost” nonsense was mere pretext to be able to maintain that it wasn’t about killing off third party apps.
Not to mention that outside of the vacuum of this specific matter, the whole ordeal was littered with duplicitous lies, like how it would be a fair and reasonable price when every other comparable API is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper, safe for Muskrat’s.
Imgur for example would charge $166/50 million request, compared to Reddit’s $12,000 for the same amount. Or put it differently, Imgur charges $276,666/y compared to Reddit’s $20MM/y.