Verge interviewed the maker of Relay for Reddit and says he might survive on a subscription only model of $2-3 USD per month. Lots of limitations inherent in that, but maybe.
It doesn't really matter, the NSFW filter will drive most people off. The price is fine, people in US would pay that much just for ad removal anyway but internationally, currency conversion will be harsh in some places. For CAD it isn't that bad atm.
It seems really telling that only one app is going to pay after all their hype about "partnerships".
Currently I'd rather support a FOSS project of my choosing with 3 bucks a month than shell out money that eventually goes to reddit. But it'd be nice for the people who don't want to leave reddit yet to have an affordable 3rd party app still as an option.
Me personally? I am done. Regardless. I have seen intimately how enshitification ruins so many good pieces of software, I am just done. This was the last straw for me. They could revert back to free API. I will be contributing to the fediverse from here on out.
I just hope others without a tech background can understand how important this movement is to the future of a free internet.
$3/month is a lot just to be able to use a 3rd party app. I don't think many users are going to go for it. And it's not like the developer is making much money off of it, it is all just to pay the new API costs.
RedReader (a realy, really good minimalist FLOSS reddit client) has been granted an exemption due to its strong focus on accessibility. however the project dev has stated that reddit is no longer to be trusted and RedReader will be integrating Lemmy and a few other networks ASAP.
Relay is the app I've been using for the past decade. It's great, and I would pay a subscription fee even though I paid for the app, but it wouldn't solve the other issues with the site. Mods still wouldn't have the tools they need to be effective and NSFW posts wouldn't be accessible, for example. Plus I don't like the idea of giving money to companies run by the likes of Steve Huffman.
Relay was my go to app also, something about the flow of the app UI always appealed to me more than any other apps. So much so, I continued using it even after I found the paid app included trackers (these can be blocked with Warden, a rare app scanner you can find on github).
However even if I wanted to stay on reddit I don't think I'd pay a monthly subscription.
Reddit really should be paying users, not the other way around. They steal our data for free and seek to profit from it.
Relay I think was the android counterpoint to Apollo in that it is always up to date with the Android design language of the time. It is by far my favourite Reddit app and DBrady is a champ. I don't know if it's worth 3USD a month though. Especially when a large chunk of that goes to Reddit. I would definitely be down for a Relay for Lemmy though.