I’ve been paying plenty of attention. If sync had raised priced to keep operating on Reddit, the users who don’t give a shit or know about the API price increase (which is realistically a large number of them) would blame Sync, not Reddit. People are idiots.

Most would rightfully stop using it, which would cause ad revenue to plummet, and would very likely make ongoing development of it infeasible since its his full-time job to maintain it.

And whatever. The specific word I used is irrelevant to my point so I don’t see why it’s necessary to be pedantic about it.

No program ever created has never needed any bug fixing or improvement. That’s the nature of software engineering.

A one line code change but community backlash and basically no new users coming onto the platform is a slow death sentence

The amount of people that subscribe would likely not pay for the ongoing maintenance costs unless he’s willing to work for shit pay. Every hour he puts into maintenance is an hour he didn’t put into maintenance the other version that actually pays well enough

Ad revenue very often dwarfs the income from subscribing users by a huge margin. Sure, a single user subscribing pays for themselves plus a little extra, but your free users make up 70-80% of your revenue

More than their time to maintain? Do you have any idea how expensive a developer’s time is? He could easily be making 120 or 200k a year with his talents

you can’t complain

You absolutely can. When this business has made zero fuss about it for more than a decade and has even welcomed them with open arms, even having meetings with them directly on many occasions, then YES you CAN complain when they suddenly do a 180 without any warning.

People working for free, very rarely company sponsorship, or businesses making open source software.

It’s good money.

The Lemmy dev is making around 30k a year. Subtract taxes from that and he’s making maybe 25k (at best).

They’re very clearly extremely talented software engineers, and you’re telling me $12 an hour is “good money”? That’s not even above minimum wage in many US states! Do you have any idea how much software engineers make?

30 days is more than enough to simply increase your existing subscription costs and remove free access

You may be a developer, but you clearly don’t know how the businesses side actually functions, especially if you’re self employed. You remove free access and you lose hundreds of thousands of users and millions of ad impressions, as well as plummeting user acquisition since people don’t buy apps. The subscription they had at the time couldnt (or barely could) cover API access. If you start charging more, you lose more users, and you also have to refund anyone that doesn’t like the increased price. You’d be lucky to keep any whole percentage of your userbase.

If it’s your sole source of income, your expenses are very likely to be largely inflexible. You’re telling me you could handle a 30 days notice to cut spending by nearly 100% while also scrambling to figure out how to completely change your monetization in a sustainable way? What if you have a mortgage? Car payments? Other loans?

It’s not as simple as flicking a switch. Even sole proprietors plan out their business 6-10 months or a year+ in advance. Giving them 30 days notice is telling them you don’t want them to exist in the first place under the guise of generosity.

Not if you remove free access. That’s a great way to lose your entire user base.

Do bless me with your knowledge, then. Donations don’t work. You don’t want ads. You don’t want subscription fees. People hate paying for apps.

There is no other option other than working for free.

Should it? Says who?

Says any business. You don’t go out and tell the people who rely on your existence to change their shit in “30 days or GTFO” other than if you give zero fucks and have no decency. Especially if you gave no indication that it was a problem for more than a decade.

made literally millions of dollars from reddit

Honestly doubtful

They also had ads, which they’d no longer gain revenue from. Ads can pull in $3-5 per month per user. That’s a massive loss.

Not really. The alternative is charging for the app in the first place, but if you do that your app fails. You include ads to help pay for development and ongoing expenses.

Offering a subscription to remove them for those that want to is secondary to that. Very few people actually subscribe to anything at all unless they absolutely have to. You’d be surprised to learn how few users actually pay to remove ads–like oftentimes less than one percent

No, reddit demanded ludicrously high fees at barely 30 days notice. It gave nobody any time at all to figure out alternative monetization strategies. Many of the third party apps had expressed their willingness to pay, but that was just absurd

… They literally offered to pay. But that price has to be reasonable, and should come with more than 30 days notice.

Then pay to remove the ads. Someone has to pay at some point and it’s either you or the guy already spending his time to make the app.

They aren’t using ads to “get people to pay” they’re using ads to pay for people who don’t want to pay

You’d get significantly more if you didn’t take it in a lump sum