The app itself uses cloud services and apis. Those cost money. Lemmy and lemmy instances cost money to run as well, and it is struggling to stay afloat with donations according to a post I read from the lemmy.world admins.

That being said, I am sure syncs monetization is setup in a way to at least make the creator a few bucks on top of paying for the services. Also, the ultimate tier on sync that is like 100 20 dollars a year basically adds access to some “advanced apis” providing translations and site previews.

Edit: 20 dollars a year not 100 for sync ultra. Also, it’s 20 dollars to remove ads forever. I think there was talk about a lifetime sync ultra for 100 dollars at some point and I got confused.