I’m loving Sync so far. I used the official reddit app ever since I was on Reddit. I sure was missing out.
I saw on the left bar there’s two options “Remove ads” and “Sync Ultra”. What’s the difference? I understand ultra is a subscription that gets ad free browsing and more. However, remove ads looks to be a single purchase “add-on”, i.e. no subscription. Is that the case? That would be nice down the line when sync for lemmy gets an official stable release.
There’s also a price difference. Ultra is 1.99$/mo or 16.99$/yr, and remove ads is 12.99$.
My question is, what costs are associated with it? The app was essentially built, the dev needed to make some changes and link to the new API which should be free now? Generally curious, because I previously paid $3 for the pro app on Reddit.
Well, let’s just do the math: the original pro version has over 100,000 downloads over it’s 10 years of life. At $3, that means the dev earn at least $300,000 over 10 years, minutes 30% play store fee. Let’s say they earn at least $27,000 per year, which is almost twice the minimum wage at the very least.
Now lets do the math for Lemmy version: some metrics say we have 1 million users. Let’s assume 10% of them are active users (100,000), and among those active users, lets assume 1% of them (10,000) buy Sync for Lemmy at $3 one time purchase (a very generous estimate). This means the dev will get $27,000 (after 30% cut from play store) from those users, ever. With this amount of money, the dev will need to earn their living somewhere else and abandon their app after a year.
I assume the dev didn’t just make the app and think he can just retire, it was just one income stream for other stuff they develop and sell, but point taken.