Update from DBrady, creator of Relay for Reddit (not me!):
Update: Relay will continue to operate from July 1st. It will be moving to a subscription model in the coming weeks but, for now, it’s available for everyone to use free of charge and ad-free!
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in updating everyone on the future of Relay. It’s taken until now for me to work things out.
For the time being, Relay is going to be free for everyone to use (this means no fees and no ads) while i continue optimising API calls and finalising subscription prices. I’m working hard to get call volumes down and i’ll try my best to hit as low a price point as possible, at least for a base tier that covers 85-90% of users. At the higher end of usage it’s looking like i’ll need to implement a few different price points but this is still something i need to figure out. I’ll let you know when i do.
Thanks again for all the incredible messages over the last week. I’ve seen them all and they really mean a lot - knowing how long some people have been using Relay for is amazing. For anyone moving on from here, thanks for supporting Relay over the last 12 years - i’m forever grateful.
Relay Pro (should now be free to use): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=reddit.news
Relay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2sTb4GzEz4
Cheers,
Dave
It make sense in the short term. Even if this only works for 6 or 12 months, they might make more to live on in that time, than they would converting the app to Lemmy right now, simply due to the massive difference in user-count.
It might be the “right” call to stick with Reddit, getting the scraps that are still there, while Lemmy is still only just taking off. They can always jump ship later, though others will have a head start by then.
Ethically? Different matter.
I’m not sure even short term thinking makes sense here. Dbrady had to remove ads in order to get access to the API. That means no income for him until he gets the subscription up and running. I assume he worked out a deal with Reddit where he’s not incurring API charges in the meantime, provided he gets the subscription version of the app up and running by some definitive date. If not, if he’s eating those API charges just with delayed billing, and hoping he can convert enough subscriptions to backfill it, whoa boy that sounds like a risky bet. In either case, he is going to spend the next few weeks working to optimize API calls and figure out the different subscription tiers and get that all set up. That sounds like a lot of work when he’s getting no (or potentially negative) income.
I don’t know, unless Dbrady is just so emotionally invested in his app that he can’t let it go, or he is financially reliant on it and doesn’t think there are any viable alternatives for himself in the short/medium term, it just doesn’t make sense to me. It just seems like an enormous risk hoping a subscription model is going to pan out, not even mentioning putting all your chips into the basket of Reddit acting in good faith moving forward, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
