To each their own, but I find this decision really misguided.
It’s her money, not mine, so whatever, but l do not expect her to turn a profit in, rather the opposite.
In my view, the cross section of “IfR” users and people willing to subscribe monthly is rather small (especially if the money mostly goes to reddit - assuming I could afford it, I, for instance, would rather fund an open system like Lemmy).
And if Apollo’s dev Christian Selig decided that it wasn’t worth it with an already established paying user base, who already has a strong culture of subscriptions and exaggerated pricings, and one of the highest volume of users, at what probably was the peak usage of the platform; I don’t see how a small app like IfR can survive.
That, or Christian made a pretty expensive mistake…
I wanted to answer this earlier, but I got sidetracked.
This actually is absolutely true, and I don’t know why I have not considered this before. Probably because I am so used to APIs providing a fully comprehensive client/user integration that I didn’t even consider that essential API features you would be paying for (through the nose) as a 3rd party developer, would have to be provided by yourself. I didn’t know reddit didn’t manage this. This is preposterous. Having to proxy ALL reddit traffic via your own infrastructure, simply to ensure your paying customers, when consuming your reddit API allocated quota are, indeed, paying, is next level stupid.
The only way to provide Reddit integration while making sure your credentials don’t get hijacked (like I did with the testing Python script I posted publicly in the bug report I made on the “Infinity for Reddit” repo) is to make your own API, on top of reddit’s.
Essentially, as you said, providing quite advanced features. Authentication, Caching, Quota management, etc, etc. I wouldn’t even do this if the reddit API was free… 🤦♂️