I generally agree with this type of analysis regarding for-profit ventures, but as a lifetime purchaser, I’m not going to try to get a refund here. I got my money’s worth out of Apollo, and Christian is handling this like a steely-eyed capitalist. He’s not asking the community to bail him out from his business decisions or Reddit taking things in a different direction, and I respect that a lot.
Very different tone from when the Twitter client developers were complaining that no one could possibly have foreseen a situation where they couldn’t deliver on services they’d happily taken money for upfront.
Did people really sell services that necessarily depended on a third party's services without some contractual safeguard in their terms in case the third party changed how they operate? There's always a risk in building your offering on top of someone else's and plenty of attempts to do that in that past didn't work out so surely any lawyer who works in this field should have seen that one coming?
Edit: This was an honest question in response to the parent comment about Twitter clients. What's with the downvotes?
Yes, they did. And yes, like you, it should have been obvious to everyone involved.
Yet for some reason, the Twitter client devs (who had happily shifted all their users to a subscription-only model) all of a sudden realized that they had sold a bunch of one year subs they had sold were going to be useless as soon as Twitter turned off the API and, more pertinent to their pocketbooks, all those customers would be entitled to request and receive a refund through the App Store for their now non-functional app. The devs started whining to their customers about being “small businesses” and having the food snatched out of their families’ mouths and why would anyone be so cruel as to seek a refund?
Christian is showing a hell of a lot more integrity and toughness than the Twitter client authors.
Very different tone from when the Twitter client developers were complaining that no one could possibly have foreseen a situation where they couldn’t deliver on services they’d happily taken money for upfront.