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I don't understand why the third party apps are shutting down instead charging a subscription fee to cover the API costs.
Short notice is going to be a big factor. Imagine having less than 3 weeks to calculate out exactly how much you need to charge your users to be able to make the payments, accounting for the Apple/Google tax, implement and test all of the required functionality in the app, including however many new screens around creating and managing subscriptions, submit the updated app through app review, hope there aren't any major bugs, and get your accounting set up to collect these massive amounts of money and send most of it to Reddit, hopefully the payment and billing timelines line up well enough that you don't end up needing to float 8-figure sums for a month or two, hopefully you did the price calculations right too and don't end up owing Reddit an 8-figure sum more than you're collecting, by the way this is 10x to 100x more money flowing through your company than you ever had, do you have the right accountants for this, what are the tax implications, oh by the way these are mostly one-man operations so that's a hell of a lot to handle with no accountants or lawyers already on your payroll.
And if Reddit imposed all of this on you with such short notice, and doesn't seem to care much what effect it has on you, what might they do next week, next month? You're not a well-capitalized operation, can you handle the next time Reddit makes a snap decision changing your whole accounting structure by 2 orders of magnitude with less than a month to respond?
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Api is expensive
Apple takes 30%
You actually need to make some profit on top of that
So we are looking at something like 4$/Month to make sense. That is absurdly high.
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Because that would never, ever work.
Nobody wants to pay for reddit.
If only that were true.
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The Apollo developer says that he would do that if he had three months to do it in and if the price were only half as large, but the one-month period that Reddit chose to provide is too short.
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