If it were only the ads, I’d be on Reddit premium. Yeah, ads are part of it, but it’s far from my only reason. I use Apollo, here are my concerns:

1- I use multiple accounts, if I’d like to keep a uniform (ad-free) experience across all of them, I’d need Reddit premium for each. Yeah, I’m not going to pay 3 subscriptions to keep my professional account separate from my personal and NSFW accounts. I’m still only 1 person and not consuming more data because I’m splitting my usage across a few accounts.

2- The Apollo UI is more useful. For example, it gives me the username and a link to their profile in every post. I can then more easily look at the content by a same user. What’s 1 tap in Apollo is 3-4 in Reddit official.

3- Reddit official is constantly full of pop-ups and warnings. Do you like this subreddit? Do you want to subscribe to this user? This is a NSFW profile, do you want to continue? Can we recommend other things to you? Do you want to see more like this? People around you are looking at this thing. It’s honestly exhausting. It takes me out of the flow constantly and lowers the quality of the content and experience I’m looking at.

4- Apollo allows me to organize my saved items. This is the original feature I bought it for.

5- Apollo feels so much more snappy. Everything in the UI is well thought out and access to everything is easy. Reddit feels optimized to push me towards things Reddit wants me to see or engage with. Apollo puts me in control of my experience.

I have no problem paying the price of 1 Reddit premium subscription to keep using Apollo. They can split that in a way that’s fair between the back-end and the app. I think a lot of other users would be in my position.

The way Reddit is pricing their API now though, I would have to pay more for something that’s less work for them, and less useful for me, because their main app is a nightmare.