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Christian squeezing Apollo for its last bit of money
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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Apollo - A beautiful app built for power and speed.
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Since many of us are trying to avoid giving reddit any traffic, this space can be used to discuss Apollo, our dreams of seeing it join the Fediverse, and to give our appreciation to @christianselig@mastodon.social for his incredible work.
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Only time he’s ever said anything close to that was a hypothetical.
https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-app-founders-apollo-riff-made-millions-using-api-2023-6
Those yearly subscribers alone bring in half a mill a year.
When someone asks you to confirm that you've made millions of dollars and you don't deny it, it's generally because it's true.
Using your logic, if I sell lemonade at a stand for $1 a glass, and sell 1000 glasses, I’ve made $1000. Regardless of how much it costs to make the lemonade, the cost of the stand, the cost of the property the stand is on.
Are you intentionally ignoring the cost of developing and running the app? Or did you assume things like servers, bandwidth, licenses and more were all free?
His servers etc aren't going to cost much because he's not doing any of the heavy lifting. His app just uses reddits API. He's not storing any content from the API. He's not recording upvotes. He's not hosting anything from there. At most he has a server for his paying customers account details. He. Isn't. Serving. The. Reddit. Traffic. Bandwidth doesn't come into it, nor do servers. Licenses? What licenses? There is no cost of "running" the app. You're talking like someone that has absolutely no idea how apps work. None of the traffic from Apollo runs through Christians servers. It's all between the customers phone and reddits servers.
If you're taking in a minimum of $500k a year making a reddit app, you're making minimum $490k profit a year from that.
Tell me you don’t understand what is being talked about without telling me you don’t understand what is being talked about.
Let’s start with an easy one, without using any back end servers how would one serve push notifications using the Reddit API?
Push notifications aren’t costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year 😂
So you’ve moved from “zero” to “not hundreds of thousands.”
So, how much does Apple take from those subscriptions? What libraries does he use that cost money? How is he checking for new content from the API when the app is closed?
You came into this with “he made hundreds of thousands because that’s what people paid” and assumed there was literally zero cost to him.
Of course all of that completely ignores a main question: Is he supposed to have done all this work for free? Should he not be paid for his time and development effort? Or are you saying that he should be paid less, simply because you don’t like him? Apollo was his main job for years, you’re saying he should be homeless by now?
I never said zero though, stop making things up.
No one "ignored" that, nor was that ever a question. He chose to make an app, and he made millions of dollars from reddits content.
Where are you getting these insane accusations from?
You’re saying he had 500,000 in income. Minus the fact that Apple takes 150,000 of that, he has to pay server costs, licensing costs for libraries, bandwidth costs, and more.
So he’d be lucky if he brought in 200k a year pre tax. A little high, but not at all crazy for the founder and primary developer of an app.
As for “Reddits content” I think it’s been pointed out hundreds of times by now, Reddit didn’t make the content, didn’t pay for the content, didn’t even promote the creation of the content.
How exactly is that “millions”? That’s just a software developer job.
Reddit owns any content posted on reddit. It's reddits content.
It's millions in revenue, and he has absolutely pocketed millions from it. Again - he refused to deny it when questioned.
So the crux of your argument, is that he made normal amounts of money, over an extended time, which added up to at least a million dollars. And that’s… bad? And somehow the fact that Reddit “owns” the content because it’s a skeevy middle man matters… just because?
“Normal amounts of money” 😂
Yeah, pretty normal for a developer to make well over 100k salary a year. Take a look at some positions available, and you see many that offer over $200k plus benefits. Add in the fact that he was the main developer, paying his own benefits, and doing work developers don’t normally do… and he’s well within the expected range.
Just because you don’t know what a software developer is worth, doesn’t mean it isn’t “normal amounts of money.”
A normal developer doesn't take in 500k of subscription revenue a year + god knows however much from one off purchases + donations and merch etc.
I'm a senior developer btw. I know there's lots of money in it, but this guy made millions piggybacking off reddits API + reddits content and then cried poor and threw his toys out of his cot. All he had to do was make a $5/month subscription option for people that still wanted to use his app and he'd still make money from that - just not the millions that he wants.
Right, “just” charge $5 a month per user. How’s that working out for all the other Reddit alternative front ends? I only know of one, and they only recently started charging so there’s a good chance they are going to need to adjust their pricing.
Did you miss the part where Reddit was essentially asking for over $1 million a month with the (at the time) current api usage?
And why are you still talking about revenue? It’s a meaningless number in this discussion, as I already went into. The reason most developers don’t make revenue from subscriptions is because they make a salary and a company does all the work of dealing with the higher level stuff.
Look at it this way, if this was a company with a CEO, an HR employee, a developer, a back end guy (yeah, you completely ignored that he paid another developer to help) and infrastructure, you wouldn’t be saying anything about $500k profit a year, in fact you’d be wondering how the hell they managed to stay in business without selling personal information. But because this is one individual (plus the developer he paid) suddenly it’s an unreasonable amount of money? lol
Yes, just make your app subscription based at $5 a month. What do you think is so difficult about that exactly?