this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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This will be an unpopular opinion, but I think reddit is mostly in the right with these API pricing changes. It makes no sense from a business perspective to allow other apps to freely profit off their services. They only fucked up with the arbitrarily short timeline which Huffman has no reasoning for and the poor communication throughout the whole process. Even Apollo dev said he was fine with them charging if he had had more time to make the transition.
I don't think charging for the API is inherently wrong, but they want to charge a ridiculous amount. It should be 1/4th of what it is, or less. The Apollo guy calculated it is 20x more than what the average user makes them, via Reddit's own previously posted user monetization stats.
Yeah it's hard to say what is a reasonable price without seeing the numbers across platforms. I know the apollo dev said it was an unreasonable amount to charge, but the relay dev said he thinks he'd be able to charge a subscription fee between $2-$3 a month and still make a profit after reddit and googles cut. He said his users average ~100 calls per day versus apollo saying ~300. Maybe there's an optimization issue there or just a lot of power users on apollo, idk. Either way, I feel like if the timeline was more like 6 months to a year transition and there would be no issue.
Christian made some excellent points in multiple interviews regarding API efficiency. One example is the difference in responsiveness by making one call to request 100 posts, vs the 4x shorter response time by requesting 25 for an immediate display, then queuing 100, resulting in a more responsive and fluid experience for the user.
I think Reddit grossly misrepresented Apollo’s “inefficiency” especially when comparing Apollo to their own application, which is objectively more burdensome to their own infrastructure due to its doubling of API calls over Apollo’s to deliver the same information.
He was given a boundary and worked within it, not knowing he’d be unfairly compared to less optimized applications that either delivered a more sluggish experience but used less API calls, or high usage applications that are also worse from a UX standpoint. No matter how you look at it, Reddit is in the wrong for usurious fees and outright lying, or by misrepresenting the facts in bad faith.
Everyone was ready to embrace monetary changes and support the platform.