Holy shit y’all. Developers need to eat too. It’s totally fine to charge for an app or serve ads. LjDawson is a fantastic developer and really listens to his user base. Yes there are plenty of open source apps to use, but sometimes closed source is way more polished because the developer makes it their job to create the app. Living isn’t free. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Holy shit y’all. Developers need to eat too. It’s totally fine to charge for an app or serve ads.
You might be forgetting that these same developers refused to simply put in a subscription to their reddit apps to continue them, instead closing their apps and telling everyone to move to lemmy because that’s where their app will be…and now adding huge subscription fees and one-off fees on a platform that doesn’t charge them to use their API lol.
Maybe I’m just cynical but this really seems like the dollar signs lit up in the reddit app devs eyes the second reddits API changes got announced.
Okay let’s do the math. According to here there is expected to be about 55.79 million folks using reddit daily. Let’s say a good 5 million folks use Sync. Now, reddit said it would charge $0.24 per 1000 API calls. You can find that here. Now 1000 calls isn’t much at all really. Let’s say those 5 million folks just 1000 API calls a day ( they wont’ actually use ONLY 1000 ). So we have 1000 * 5,000,000 * 0.24 = $1,200,000,000. That’s per day. Does that seem sustainable to you? Like if folks were using MUCH MUCH less I could see your point. But the fact is…they weren’t and reddit were being assholes about it. Now compare that to what he’s charging. $17 bucks for a year. Let’s break that down and compare it to what he’d be paying per day. Say all 5 million users were paying for Ultra. That’s 5,000,000 * 17 = $85,000,000. Divide that by 12 to get per month. 85,000,000/12 = $7,083,333 per month. Divide by 30 for average revenue per day. $7,083,333/30 = $236,111. Now tell me that even comes close to $1,200,000,000. Your logic is flawed. This doesn’t even account for fees and possible server costs.
Let’s say those 5 million folks just 1000 API calls a day ( they wont’ actually use ONLY 1000 ).
Correct - 99% of those people will use nowhere near 1000 API calls a day. Each persons subscription only has to cover the costs of their API usage.
A $5/month subscription, at $0.24/1000 api calls, gives each user just under 21,000 API calls per month. Most people aren’t going to be doing anywhere close to that.
This doesn’t even account for fees and possible server costs.
Sync doesn’t need any server costs. It’s not hosting an instance of Lemmy.
Also your maths is off by 1000x lol. The cost would be 1.2mil a day, not 1.2bil a day. You’re multiplying by 1000 for some reason, when the $0.24 already gets you 1000 api calls. So if all 5 million used 1000 calls per day, that’s 5 million x $0.24, which is $1.2mil.
You replied to the very answer to your question. Apps can still be businesses, not everything has to be free. There’s a bunch of free alternatives, this is just one of the paid ones.
They moved to lemmy because the fees on Reddit where exorbitant, and he’d have to raise the prices too much to keep same wage (Haven’t looked at the numbers). Afterall, it’s he’s app, and he’s to decide what wage he wants to keep working on it.
The boost developer that was at the heart of most of the uproar said that a subscription of $5/month would more than cover the API costs.
He made millions of dollars from Reddit, but drew the line at a $5/month subscription to compensate Reddit for making him a millionaire.
No that’s not correct. sync for Reddit already had the ultra subscription. The problem was he would have had to up the price on the sub substantially to cover the Reddit API fees.
Maybe a one time payment like for original sync, imagine supporting subscription services for a FOSS app 🤡🤡🤡
I’m obviously referring to lemmy when I say foss app, you think you look smart being a contrarian?
Perhaps when you create your own app you can determine your own cost model.
I believe he has plans for that
Lemmy is funded by Patreon/Liberapay… Which are essentially subscriptions
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their default model isnt based on ads like sync for lemmy
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a third party client isnt as much work as the fediverse as u see it took him a month
3)ads used to be a one time payment for his old app, so the money was enough for him back then and now hes even richer so why do you excuse his greediness?
