I'm seeing some conflicting comments in this thread. Feels like some people are confusing us with the server admins, and also how Lemmy works in general.

Some points:

• Lemmy is defederated, so Lemmy can't just start charging API fees. Lemmy does not control the API in that way. The devs have no power over that except for their own instance (here at lemmy.ml). I imagine if any server admin started trying to charge for API usage, people would just stop interacting with that server.
• We would never ever put ads in Memmy to make money. We both absolutely hate ads and would never do that. And if we did, someone could just fork Memmy, remove ads, and make that available to users. But I promise as long as I'm involved with Memmy, there would never be ads. I am positive gk feels the same way.
• Other than gk's small server that he's running for push notifications, we don't really have any expenses specifically for the app.
• gk has an open collective and buy me a coffee for donations. He's also looking into setting up a recurring donation option in app - but at the moment this would not give you anything in return, it just would be a way to donate a couple bucks a month.
• gk is working on this much more than I am, as he's between jobs at the moment and I have a full time job. So that being said, I'm not really interested in monetizing Memmy (unless I could make as much money from Memmy as I do at my job which I doubt would ever happen). But since gk is basically working on this like a full time job, I can't speak for him and his goals. He's also the actual owner of the app, I'm his sidekick 😎.
• At very best, if we ever paywalled anything (not sure if that's even allowed with our open source license), it would just be like extra icons or something. We would never put any actual features behind a paywall.

Sorry for the rambling, I am very bad at organizing my thoughts. Let me know if you guys have any questions.

The best in my opinion as a user would be to offer a basic version and a very cheap (like 2 or 3 bucks) one time payment premium version which has some convenient features.

I do not pay for premium versions to get rid of ads, and I would hate to see ads in the basic version. I do pay off it's cheap and I appreciate the dev

They will charge crazy high fees for API access

First I can't speak for the Memmy devs but here's my personal experience:

In theory something like a mobile app doesn't really have any reoccurring costs, at least not with Lemmy, etc... Not natively, anyway. Sure there's the $100 cost for an iOS dev account but that's nothing in the end. Should Lemmy start to introduce API access fees, again that could change, but that's a long way off if ever.

The question really comes down to, long term, how much time are the devs spending on development and if they want to make money with this or not.

As some of us find this sort of development, well "fun", and just do this as a hobby rather than as an income stream. And any small costs we'll just eat because quite frankly we were going to build these apps anyway, if not just for ourselves why not share them with the rest of the community?

Long story short, Memmy (and the other mobile apps) may not need to charge anything as it's not costing the devs anything more than time. Now Lemmy itself, is a completely different story.

I've actually had an idea for funding both 3rd-party apps and potentially server instances: a reddit gold-equivalent.

It essentially would function like a super-upvote (no impact on post/comment rank, just "cosmetic"). Users can buy it through the app or website (for instances that allow and support it), and the cost would be fixed to some (low) value. That way, it's like a donation with perks.

However, this would only support the app/instance where "Lemmy gold" is purchased. So, instead, when the user gives gold to a post/comment, the donation gets split between the user's home instance, the instance where the post/comment is hosted, and the app/instance where the gold was purchased (either even split or some percentage TBD).

I think this would help offset the costs of running an instance, developing an app and handling banking transactions, but of course it's a rough idea. I'd be happy to know what potential issues/avenues for exploitation people could find with such a system.

I do have a bit of relevant programming experience but sadly not much time for it. I'd imagine the way to get it started is to run an experimental instance and collaborate with a specific app like memmy in the beginning, then make one-on-one agreements with other instances until it becomes a norm across the federation.

Some random thoughts:

• receiving gold could have a small knock-on perk e.g. for each gold you receive you get one silver to give to someone else, and it ends there.
• receiving gold would always be purely cosmetic, i.e. never have an impact ranking-wise and no UX perks
• maybe eventually used on Mastodon/across the fediverse?
• no idea how people would react to it
• no idea what the percentages should be, or how transactions should be handled (e.g. bundle all from one instance to another daily?)
• it's starting to smell like crypto/NFTs, but this would be absolutely fungible, and no speculative market crap here please

Thoughts? (Sorry for the wall of text, had this idea brewing for some time)