Premium Launch

Today we launched Apollo Premium. A journey that started at the beginning of the year is at a close, but another is just beginning.

The idea for a Premium tier first came to me early this year when we were migrating Apollo to AWS with a managed database, which ended up costing significantly more than we were paying previously. We did this for a good reason though. Earlier this year, Apollo started to take off. For context, Apollo was on 2,000 Discord servers as of January 20th, 2020. Today, just four months later, Apollo is on almost 9,000 servers. This was a bit of a wake up call for us, as we weren't doing much to protect our user's data should anything go wrong. As mentioned previously, this new hosting service, while providing more protection, was costing us more, and would continue to cost more as our user count increased.

It was clear to me that we needed to do a better job of driving engagement on Patreon, as with the current rate of growth, and the costs associated with it, we were on track to be paying hundreds of dollars a year to keep the lights on. However, it's one thing to know that you need more cash flow; executing a plan to get you there is the tricky part.

There were quite a few hurdles in our way before we could (in my mind) realistically pursue any form of paid features.

You may recall that Apollo had a few very lengthy outages early this year. These were ultimately caused by poor code on my end. I didn't understand the world in which we were living, and made some costly mistakes. It took me about a month and a half to fully clean out the offending code, as it was a very core concept that I had made an incorrect assumption on.

You may also recall the controversial change to remove the sorting of events by their start date. This wasn't the most fun change to make, as I knew it would conflict with the workflow of some of our users. However, it was another change I felt was necessary in order to achieve a more sustainable application as we continued to grow.

I also spent a lot of time fixing up wording of various messages, fleshing out the help command, and in general trying to make Apollo better. There's still lots to be done here, but the point being that I didn't feel write offering a paid service with software that I consider to be subpar.

With the groundwork laid for a solid application, there was more groundwork to be laid for Premium to take place. The integration with Patreon, as well as the `!premium` command, while they don't add much value to Apollo directly, were some of the more complex features I've added to Apollo yet!

Lastly came the first Premium feature: custom signup options. However, this was no walk in the park either. We had to rewrite much of the core data structures for tracking event attendance, as I'd written most of Apollo not knowing that we'd one day want different types of signup options beyond the default. But we made it!

Once again, thank you for supporting Apollo; it means the world. Doing so covers our ongoing costs, and will hopefully one day be a way for me to earn a small passive income for doing what I love. You guys are the best.

Looking forward to where we'll go next!