They need to earn more than the dev of sync who don't split the revenue with the Lemmy dev and the instances. The split of the revenues is fair for everyone. Lemmy devs, instances and Sync dev receive something for their work.
He is literally making money on the back of the people donating. Without these donator his business doesn't make any sense and wouldn't exist.
"Adding" ads to a FOSS service is pretty sinister especially if it only cost $3.99/year to remove them from the Sync for Reddit app.
Lemmy could use some white hat bug hunters to find security vulnerabilities before malicious actors do, like Mozilla helping patch Mastodon’s TootRoot.
Reddit had considerably more users when Sync was created- so smaller amount per person over larger user base would pay for the bill.
With Lemmy, user base isn’t there yet to create that same economies of scale - so to pay for the dev’s time - each person would need to pay a larger amount.
You can't compare Reddit and Lemmy. They are different with a different model. Lemmy rely on donation. Reddit has ads and investors.
The dev of Sync did money with Reddit but Reddit had a source of revenue.
Lemmy relying on donation doesn't have this source of revenue. This is why splitting the revenue of Sync between Lemmy's devs, instances and Sync's dev is fair.
If someone donate to the Lemmy's devs and/or instances, this person allows the sync's dev to make money on this donation. This isn't fair.
The sync model with Lemmy is predatory at best and parasitic at least.
80% of the app is the same. It's not like he spent years creating a new app from scratch. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve compensation but I feel like he's being a bit gougey in this situation.
@1ird@chargingtriceratops Regional pricing hasn't been set up yet, but he plans to make a single time purchase option in the future, and set up Regional pricing
I'm pretty sure he had to rewrite all of the code related to network and the API, and that's not little work. Thats weeks worth of work including testing