Every user pays the same for the app, but the app pays an amount dependent on how much its users are browsing and posting. So if your users are all lurkers who open Reddit once a day, then you can make an easy profit charging a small fee. But if your core userbase are power posters and mods and people who spend every bathroom break on reddit, you’ll lose money unless you charge a huge subscription.
The power users moving to Lemmy actually made these app subscriptions cheaper and more financially viable, because it brought down the activity level of their average user. If things had stayed the same, apps would be more expensive to run.
Funny enough, the more reddit dies, the more profitable third party apps get.
Yeah, I get that. But the devs know what their average API calls are per user, seems like they would have landed on those numbers here; less frequent users likely subsidize power users to some extent. Or, like reddit, they could price it dynamically based on your usage too.
But you also might be right that it’s only affordable if ALL power users moved on. Probably fewer moved here than we’d hope/expect, but I’m sure it helped.
Every user pays the same for the app, but the app pays an amount dependent on how much its users are browsing and posting. So if your users are all lurkers who open Reddit once a day, then you can make an easy profit charging a small fee. But if your core userbase are power posters and mods and people who spend every bathroom break on reddit, you’ll lose money unless you charge a huge subscription.
The power users moving to Lemmy actually made these app subscriptions cheaper and more financially viable, because it brought down the activity level of their average user. If things had stayed the same, apps would be more expensive to run.
Funny enough, the more reddit dies, the more profitable third party apps get.
Yeah, I get that. But the devs know what their average API calls are per user, seems like they would have landed on those numbers here; less frequent users likely subsidize power users to some extent. Or, like reddit, they could price it dynamically based on your usage too.
But you also might be right that it’s only affordable if ALL power users moved on. Probably fewer moved here than we’d hope/expect, but I’m sure it helped.