Christian has decided to squeeze Apollo again for more money, besides the wallpapers and asking people to decline their prorated refund. Christian additionally forced a pop up ad advertising this plushie.

This is just exposing to more people the greediness that Christian has tapped into recently. Recall that previously, Christian forced daily pop up ads to paid pro users to get them to subscribe to ultra, which was originally stated to only be for notifications since it required a server, but now had all new features attached to it, even very simple local features. Reddit did him dirty, but to be honest, he may have had it coming. He previously disabled ultra access to Jailbroken devices as well, even if they were valid paid users. Christian also didn’t provide refunds to lifetime users who bought it before all the API stuff. Speaking of that, does anyone remember how instead of stating the price was increasing (which happened all the time) he instead said it was “going on sale at the old price”? Kinda misleading.

  • Whirlybird
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    7 months ago

    https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-app-founders-apollo-riff-made-millions-using-api-2023-6

    Apollo’s Selig did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment regarding the “millions” Huffman claims he has made. But when reached The Verge reached out to him for comment, he did not deny the claim.

    Selig has said that Apollo has around 50,000 yearly subscribers that pay around $10 per year.

    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.

    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      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?

      • Whirlybird
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          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?

          • Whirlybird
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            7 months ago

            Push notifications aren’t costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year 😂

            • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              7 months ago

              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?

              • Whirlybird
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                7 months ago

                So you’ve moved from “zero” to “not hundreds of thousands.”

                I never said zero though, stop making things up.

                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?

                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.

                Apollo was his main job for years, you’re saying he should be homeless by now?

                Where are you getting these insane accusations from?

                • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  7 months ago

                  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.

                  • Whirlybird
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                    7 months ago

                    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.

                    Reddit owns any content posted on reddit. It’s reddits content.

                    How exactly is that “millions”? That’s just a software developer job.

                    It’s millions in revenue, and he has absolutely pocketed millions from it. Again - he refused to deny it when questioned.