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They buried the lede. The article suggests the shutdown was because of free API to paid API. Anyone uninformed who just click off at that point. Even when they

They buried the lede. The article suggests the shutdown was because of free API to paid API. Anyone uninformed who just click off at that point. Even when they ask about costs, it was just saying it’s “<$1 vs $2.50”. But the issue is two fold. (1) all the devs support a paid API, but the rate is absurd according to basic math. It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth. Devs were willing to take on a higher cost (2-3x) but over 20x is impossible. (2) That basic math was very conservative. The actually multiplier is much higher if you look at the calculations. It’s wild but it seems Christian is even willing to accept a 10x bump (albeit with a higher subscription cost). Not really mentioned was all this was changed out the blue with less than 30 days to comply. The interview touches on it but it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint.

gs17 3y ago
Do they really think it's reasonable? I presumed it was meant to kill off third party clients.
- redmerchant2 3y ago
  I’m just following Christian’s good faith interpretation. But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name. Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the first to go. The value vs cost calculus is negative.
  - George83728 3y ago
    Those bots also shit up the S/N and generally disrupt conversations with useless replies nobody asked for. They're a big part of the reason I stopped using reddit. Related: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...
    - petersellers 3y ago
      Even more egregious are those stupid "RemindMe!" bots which in a very ham-fisted way create noise for everyone except the one person triggering the bot (ironically, a 3rd party app would be way better suited at implementing this specific feature)
      - PoorlyNamed 3y ago
        Apollo implemented this as a feature last year in fact.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        People have wanted schedulers and the ability to subscribe fr updates posts for years. Thankfully, RES has had that for almost a decade now. Don't think Reddit even acknowledged that feature request, compared to others they said "we're working on it" some 7 years ago. Closest they got is how the subscriber plan lets you highlight new comments in a post (something RES also had, but reddit made them remove it), but you still can't notify yourself to when new comments occur. Just another example of not considering the user. Pretty sure filtering subreddits from r/all was the last user-centric feature they made. And that was more made out of spite of the political shitshow that was 2016/7 as opposed to thinking about the users.
    - bagels 3y ago
      Has Time Cube vibes.
      - tkanarsky 3y ago
        From the great "welcome to my meme page" on FB.
        bagels 3y ago
        Thank you, I'd never seen this genre of... absurdity before.
    - castlecrasher2 3y ago
  - latortuga 3y ago
    I don't think this is inconsistent at all. Bots don't look at or click on ads. Bots don't engage or create community. Bots don't buy awards. Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people.
    - realusername 3y ago
      To my knowledge, ads and buying awards were never available from the API anyways so it's not like Reddit can use that as a valid argument
    - willis936 3y ago
      It is inconsistent because spez has repeatedly said that 3P apps, Apollo in particular, are inefficient with their API usage which is preventing reddit from becoming profitable. It is their (thinly veiled) lie to justify the pricing because they think shutting down 3P apps and being caught lying at the same time is a better PR move than just shutting down 3P apps.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people. bot querying also doesn't make them any revenue, yet it is a common source of strain on the community. I imagine it also makes spam detection that much trickier. While there are some amazing bots (and ofc, automod) there are so many bots out there just to make noise. And reddit is already pretty noisy as is.
  - harrelchris 3y ago
    It's either meant to kill 3rd party apps, or it's an impressive failure by Steve Huffman to create another revenue stream for Reddit.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Makes me wonder why even bother in that case to introduce phony pricing.
  - gs17 3y ago
    IMO, it tries to shift the blame a little. Pretend the price is reasonable and the developers who shut down the apps instead of paying are who took your app away, not the company. Killing them outright would make the blame very clearly on Reddit's side. The other benefit is if anyone does decide to pay, it's profitable.
    - mynameisvlad 3y ago
      They probably also didn't anticipate quite this extreme of a blowback. The response to killing 3rd party apps outright would have likely been the same as this, but when they did their calculations they probably expected the response to this to be less extreme and opted for the "safer" choice.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      Except that doesn't work if every single third party app shuts down, which as far as I know is the case. That's why I roll my eyes and gag in disgust a little when I hear Reddit management and their apologists somehow try to blame Christian for not negotiating in good faith. Even if that were true (which, to be clear, I don't believe it actually is, the opposite in fact), it just means that some other developer would step up if the pricing let them continue. The fact that every other app also shut down just proves that was the entire goal of these API pricing changes in the first place.
- ljm 3y ago
  Even that makes little sense. Reddit has survived on volunteer moderation and their use of third party tools to manage the workload. If Reddit doesn’t want to cover the cost of that infrastructure then they’re going to incur the extra cost of hiring moderators. I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API (and thus third party clients) and since these companies see ads as a money printing scheme they’re happy to sacrifice whatever they can for it.
  - curun1r 3y ago
    > I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API Even that doesn’t make sense. They could’ve just told app developers a) we’re going to start co-mingling ads in API responses and b) that failure to render those ads according to our guidelines will result in banning your client id. Users would still be free to purchase a premium account to avoid ads. Everyone would find that reasonable and there would’ve been no revolt. They could’ve even imposed per-user API quotas to avoid the kind of data harvesting that was being done to train LLMs. And they could’ve even threatened Christian with a ban if he didn’t improve the caching in his app, since that’s another criticism they’ve lobbed his way. All that is targeted at making 3P app users contributing members of a profitable platform. But they did none of that and, instead, quoted him an FU price that will force him to shut down.
    - babypuncher 3y ago
      This would have been plenty fair in my opinion, and may have even gotten me to buy Reddit premium. Instead I'm just walking away from the platform and my own small community of 15,000 readers that I've spent 7 years building.
      - ljm 3y ago
        I'm not sure even that Reddit has a genuine value prop beyond being a new walled garden to gather data and serve ads. But it might be too big to truly fail, now, because newer generations of internet users have only experienced the feudal internet. Once upon a time this was all served by RSS, forums, and niche websites. Reddit converted those communities to subreddits, Facebook took another slice of those. Discord and Slack portioned away other groups as did Tumblr and each one has attempted to establish a moat not just to keep competitors away, but to keep their users inside.
- potatolicious 3y ago
  I agree with this take - this seems pretextual rather than a good-faith attempt to charge for API access. Because history rhymes I suspect Reddit's leadership was heavily inspired by Twitter's killing of third-party clients, which actually ended up working out for Twitter. IMO Huffman's behavior in this entire saga has been extremely wanting, to the degree where one has to wonder about his suitability to lead the company. And to be clear - I'm actually someone who is sympathetic to Reddit's position, where a lot of the platform's value generation isn't being captured by them and the company is unprofitable. I'm a very long-time Reddit user but I'm generally pretty meh about the various tempests-in-a-teapot psychodramas that emerge from there, and I remain generally cool to the popular uprising rhetoric - but Huffman's behavior is pretty egregious. And this is why I don't really see this resolving peaceably - Huffman at this point seems personally aggrieved by Selig and one has to wonder if he's behaving in a capacity that maximizes the interests of his company vs. descending into a petty personal feud. I may be grossly misinterpreting him here - but based on his disastrous AMA and his haughty proclamations it's not an unreasonable perception. More importantly, as a company that is 100% reliant on mass volunteer labor to even exist, the fact that this perception has been projected, reinforced, and not usefully countered in any way suggests disqualifying leadership inability.
  - tornato7 3y ago
    No matter how you look at it, Reddit leadership massively screwed this up. When half your site goes offline for two days and the entire front page is calling for the CEO's head, it's obvious that they have lost touch. And since they aren't reversing course on this, you can assume even more user-hostile changes are coming in the near future.
    - proamdev123 3y ago
      Agreed. And it’s actually 90% of the site offline at this point. And many subreddits have said they’ll be private indefinitely, not just 2 days.
      - OGWhales 3y ago
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  Isn't the whole point of this to charge AI companies harvesting reddit data? I thought 3rd party apps are collateral.
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    I see this theory a lot and I'm not so sure. The Reddit API makes things easier, but with this new pricing it makes way more sense for AI companies to go back to scraping. But at the end of the day, AI companies aren't Reddit's users. Redditors don't have any reason to care about that, we have nothing to gain from Reddit charging AI companies for API access. So Reddit structing their response to AI in a way that completely dicks over so many users is never going to go over well. And it doesn't help that their CEO is acting like a petulant manchild the entire time.
ryanmerket 3y ago
Basic math? Let's do the math... Let's say Apollo, Relay, or RIF charged $2/mo per user. Would that be enough to cover their expenses? Looking at Reddit's now API pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month. Google/Apple App Stores take a 15% commission on subscriptions so a total per month per customer average cost would be $0.83 cents. That means the devs would make $0.98 cents per month per user on a $2 subscription fee. (30 cents to Google, 73 cents to reddit, 98 cents left to pocket). With this user base, even if only like 20,000 people subscribe the devs stand to make $20,000 every month in profit. The Relay for Reddit dev breaks it down here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/update_how_the_current_api_changes_would_impact/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/upd... Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 50% conversion rate (meaning half of the users decide to subscribe) and charging $2.00 a month, he would make $750,000 / PER MONTH. That's with the new Reddit fees. More: https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/comment/jnt6ies/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/com...
- tyg13 3y ago
  50% conversion is laughably high. The number of people in that Relay thread saying they wouldn't pay for the app was unsurprising to me. Not to mention that 3rd party apps would still not have access to NSFW content. I'd be surprised if the conversion rate was as high as 10%. The estimate I saw for current subscribers ($1/month) to Apollo was 50k which is a little over 3% of users.
  - ryanmerket 3y ago
    Even if it was 10% he's still printing cash for a lifestyle business. That 1% is an optional $1.49/mo. If it's a mandatory $2.99/mo you're looking at 10-20% easy. And he's printing cash.
    - tyg13 3y ago
      Still way too high. Also, the actual figure I saw from the Apollo dev (different from the Relay dev's numbers) was 345 API calls per day per user, which changes your math significantly. The other issue was that 30 days notice is not even close to enough time to pivot in terms of business model. He mentioned he has significant operating costs already, due to paying for caching servers as well as part-time help. Not only does he already have to refund users who paid for year-long subscriptions, but he'd also have to turn around and ask them for almost double the money for the same service. The fact that he's shuttering his business entirely (thus foregoing all potential profit) rather than "printing money" as you put it, makes me think he has a good reason to think his financial situation is a lot more untenable than your rough analysis would indicate.
googlryas 3y ago
Why does there need to be a paid API, when reddit provides all of the content over a free HTTP API to user agents already? Are these apps more than just a custom user agent?
- paddw 3y ago
  The free API is going away
  - wtallis 3y ago
    I think he was trying to be clever by referring to the standard web interface as the free HTTP API, which is true to a limited extent. It's a poorly-designed and unstable API. The use of the unpopular term "user agent" may have made it harder to understand, but I appreciate almost any opportunity to bring that term back, because it has important implications that "web browser" lacks.
  - googlryas 3y ago
    The free HTTP API I'm talking about is just GET / HTTP/1.0...aka the web interface offered by reddit.com on port 80 or 443
  - unmole 3y ago
    It isn't. > Rate limits for the free tier > All others will continue to access the Reddit Data API without cost, in accordance with our Developer Terms, at this time. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...
- nlarew 3y ago
  There are two Reddit APIs - the public REST API and a private GraphQL API which limits access. Third-party apps use the REST API and the Reddit website/app use GQL. For a hobby project you could maybe get away with scraping a GQL bearer token and issuing requests as if you were an official Reddit client. Or you could even request the HTML and scrape that. At the scale of these third party apps that approach just wouldn't work.
jarym 3y ago
Also the normal way to introduce pricing to free services is to make it initially super-cheap so the majority will find it reasonable. Then overtime increase prices as you get a better sense of value and market dynamics. Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart. It’s now some governments go with taxation before u-turning some years later when they’ve driven away or killed whatever it is they were hoping to tax.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  That’s assuming that you want people to use your API for third party apps. Reddit has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in that, despite the things they say. In that sense, it makes perfect sense to jack up the price to a shocking level to force everyone to stop without outright banning them.
  - revscat 3y ago
    I’m not so sure. I think Huffman saw all the hype around ChatGPT, and how they trained their model on Reddit comments, and had a fantasy about charging AI companies high rates for future API usage. Apollo, et. al., were an afterthought, if consideration was given to them at all.
    - mynameisvlad 3y ago
      That's certainly fair, but you'd hope that out of the 2000 employees, at least some are in a position to evaluate decisions like that and explicitly calculate the PR risk of any decision. And they certainly should have taken it into account.
      - gknoy 3y ago
        Not only that, if they really didn't want to kill 3rd party apps, they've had a week to say, "oh no! We see exactly how this is going to kill third party apps, let's iterate to try to fix it so that we don't do that", instead of doubling down on a feud with them.
paxys 3y ago
> It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth Are you implying that a user is worth $0.125/mo to Reddit? Because that is laughably inaccurate. Mature platforms like Facebook extract up to $60 per user per quarter in advertising revenue from developed countries. Reddit itself made an estimated $500M+ from ads last year. ~$2.50/mo is already more than fair. Thinking that Reddit owes full data access to anyone for pennies is absurd.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I think the question is how much money they apps can make from having users, not Reddit.
  - paxys 3y ago
    The apps can make whatever they charge. $2.50 is now the base cost to add to every subscription. If the users value the service they will pay. Developers already pay Apple & Google 30% for the privilege of being in the app stores. Is it too much for the very service that is powering your entire app to ask for their own cut?
    - darknessmonk 3y ago
      > Developers already pay Apple & Google 30% for the privilege of being in the app stores. Is it too much for the very service that is powering your entire app to ask for their own cut? Mind you that price is just part of the problem - the 30-day to start charging, was just as bad. It's absurd and completely made to kill the 3PS. Maybe if they have maintained the price but gave time for apps to discuss/adapt/replan, they could have found other options.
    - Marsymars 3y ago
      Even granting the rest of your argument, that math stops working for users who don’t use a particular app as their primary/only method to access reddit. I use reddit 80% on the web, 10% on iOS and 10% on Android. I’m not going to pay reddit that full $2.50 (plus app store cut) for 10% of my usage twice. I’m just going to stop using reddit on mobile and stick to the web. The “pay for reddit premium and get ad-free reddit plus unrestricted third-party app use” model makes more sense for users, for third party apps, and for reddit.
lacker 3y ago
Why is this rate absurd? From the article, it says Reddit would charge Apollo $2.50 per user per month. Right now, ad-free YouTube costs $12 a month, ad-free Twitch costs $12 a month. I can't buy ad-free Twitter at any price. Is it really not worth $2.50 a month to have ad-free Reddit? Personally, I like Apollo, and I would be willing to pay to keep an ad-free Reddit experience. I'm disappointed that the two sides didn't manage to work this out. I feel like Reddit is getting attacked despite being the company that is trying the hardest to make this work. The standard approach is just to ban apps that compete with the in-house app. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, all of those services just completely forbid things like Apollo. All these complaints are going to encourage companies to simply ban alternate apps rather than trying to price an API in the future.
- tmpz22 3y ago
  The new rate would require Apollo to monetize its entire userbase which includes a large number of free users and life-time-membership users in addition to increasing rates for existing subscribers. Further switching to the reddit-model would require turning their back on free users with disabilities. So while it is practical to shell out many of the principals behind the Apollo project in order to meet Reddit's IPO stat-padding requirements, the developer has chosen to shut down.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  I mean, if by “trying the hardest” you mean “saying they’re trying the hardest while not outright banning apps” then sure, I guess they tried the hardest. They’ve made it pretty clear they’re not really trying to keep apps. Several developers in the Huffman interview pointed out that they’ve reached out for months if not years to absolute silence in return.
- neura 3y ago
  You're comparing video streaming services (one of them a live streaming service) that have far more cost per user, to something that has far more minimal costs. You're also comparing individual account cost per user that includes much more than just API access. Where is your evidence or even subjective knowledge about Reddit being the company that's trying the hardest to make this work? Also, to answer your initial question, regardless of anything else in your comment, the rate is absurd because it clearly falls under bait and switch. Build up your userbase, including offering your content from an API until you're basically the monopoly in your market and then start charging per month, per user, for API access. It's not like individual users are paying for their API access and feeding that API key to other apps to use. It's clearly meant to crush 3rd party apps, not facilitate Reddit making money through 3rd party apps. They can make far more money through their own massively ad infested app without providing any of the features that make other apps attractive, if they just crush 3rd party apps. In which case, why both charging for the API. As others have suggested, why not just shut it down or limit it? Simply because they want to appear as if they're not shutting out the world, while still doing exactly that.
judge2020 3y ago
In one of Christian's posts, reddit agreed that the price was for the opportunity cost of serving that user without ads - since they're not going to get any ad money from these users (and are unwilling to serve ads to these 3p clients since they probably can't guarantee to advertisers the 3p app isn't doing anything shady like hiding the ad while logging an impression).
- ericbarrett 3y ago
  Something I've been wondering—why couldn't the API just send a batch of ads to be served with the content? Since the apps need an authorized API key, if they don't cooperate in showing the ads then Reddit could simply threaten revocation. Then users who want "premium" could pay for whatever feature Reddit-side to allow an ad-free experience, or they could even partner with the third party apps to offer it for a cut of the fee. (This is assuming Reddit is negotiating in good faith, though that seems to be in question.)
  - phire 3y ago
    They probably did not negotiate in good faith. But.... I understand the API that the 3rd party apps interact with is powered by the legacy platform. The same platform that powers old reddit. It doesn't seem like reddit are updating that platform anymore (I haven't noticed any major changes to old reddit in years), and I really don't think it has the ability to serve the same ads that the new reddit platform does. It would take a major refactor to either replicate the full API over to the new platform or otherwise feed ads back to it. BTW, this also raises questions about how much longer reddit will keep old reddit running. It really looks like they are planning to retire the old platform all-together.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    Because ads still need all the privacy-invading telemetry from the client device, which these apps wouldn't want to participate in.
    - randomdata 3y ago
bottlepalm 3y ago
It's funny when I design my own public apps, I'm careful about API usage. I can only imagine what an app is like that was designed with no API limits whatsoever. It's kind of amazing Reddit ever allowed this sort of no limits API usage - while at the same time Apollo charged their own users while enjoying zero infrastructure costs. What a steal.
- lights0123 3y ago
  How is 345 calls/day—much lower than the official app's usage—that much when the server indicates that 60 calls/minute is all good?
  - bottlepalm 3y ago
    When I use the website, my costs are covered by seeing ads. Now I have to watch more ads to make up for API users who don't pay.
    - brokenmachine 3y ago
      I use Adblock, so don't forget you're making up for me too.
  - shagie 3y ago
    The mobile client may be 345 calls/day. The backend server push server is a bit more active at about 600 calls/hour/user. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13_rejected/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13... > For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs. That 345 calls/day is again mentioned https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1734 https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1734 but shortly afterwards ( https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 ) he describes the process for push notifications (10 days ago - this isn't just the 1.3 release from 5 years ago): > I guess there's an analogy um the way Reddit notifications work just for your inbox like you got a message or something um they work in so far as if I the developer of the app want to um say make sure that you get that notification within 10 seconds I have to be checking Reddit every 10 seconds to go like is there anything new is there anything new? is there anything new? is there anything new? okay. There is okay I'll tell is there anything new and then just repeating that at nauseam so you can imagine if you get a message once a week I'm checking every 10 seconds and then once during that whole week I get that message and then I can send it to you um so 99.99 of those API calls were wasted so we've talked to Reddit like that my friend who works on my server um and myself and I've said like what would be so much better is if we could just kind of keep like a port open with Reddit and say like you just tell us when there's a notification ready and we'll beam it off we don't have to bug you all the time and it's logical right and that's how a lot of services do it it's like an event-based API and um that's just not something reddit's ever uh given us He's making a lot more than 345 calls per day per user.
raydev 3y ago
> it would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth This is Selig's estimate based on not much info. Numbers like "20x" are completely made up.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  Do you really think reddit spends 2.50 monthly per user on their 430 million MAU? That would mean 13 billion dollars in expenses yearly.
  - tornato7 3y ago
    Reddit should realistically charge for lost revenue rather than lost expenses. Instagram makes $50B annual revenue on 2 billion users, or around $25/user/year. I'm certain that Reddit is making nowhere near that per user, but they're probably pricing their API along their most optimistic projections.
    - shbooms 3y ago
      I can't find the source but in some of the communication Selig released between him and Reddit a few days ago, Reddit themselves confirmed that their pricing is based on lost oppurtunity cost per user, not just expenses
  - raydev 3y ago
    I don’t really think of any number, because that would be silly. None of us know the answer nor can we confidently estimate what it is. Therefore any attempt to justify or argue costs by us is useless.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      We can confidently assume it's not 26x their annual revenue. That would be silly.
- dsr_ 3y ago
  Based on the info that Reddit had disclosed earlier, it might be inaccurate today but it's not fair to say "completely made up" -- unless Reddit made it up.
xyst 3y ago
Agree. Before subreddit mods voluntarily blacked out, the Apollo developer stated he would pay millions of dollars per year ($20M/year?) with the increased rates. It’s insane. Reddit C-level executives suggested Apollo was poorly optimized or something. I think if it truly costs that much to use Reddit’s API, then maybe it’s on reddit to make their backend more efficient. If that’s not the case then it’s clearly just another case of corporate greed and pumping the numbers for the IPO. I really hope the blackout is sustained for longer than 2 days. People need a break from social media and their echo chambers. Plus only 2 days of decreased user activity is nothing to Reddit. It will stay relevant for 1-2 news cycles. C-level executives brush it off to board as “turbulence”. Then it’s back to business of extracting as much value from the users
- klodolph 3y ago
  > I think if it truly costs that much to use Reddit’s API, then maybe it’s on reddit to make their backend more efficient. I am a bit skeptical that efficiency is part of the formula here. Reddit's running an entire company here, and I'm guessing that API call efficiency is only a small part of the cost (considering that they serve things that cost real money, like video).
- shagie 3y ago
  $0.24/1k calls isn't absurd (its expensive, yes, but only ~3x more than the rate for Imgur). The issue is that Apollo was doing 600 calls per hour per user to push notifications with a less than 10 second window between "when it hits your mailbox" to "when it shows up on your iDevice". When that 600 calls per hour per user gets billed at $0.24/1k calls it gets very expensive. If those calls were done to the main application (not showing ads) at the same rate that the official application does, it would represent several million dollars of lost advertising revenue. On the other hand, it represents a fairly consistent load on the servers that doesn't generate any revenue that can misbehave quite badly when there is an outage and per user rate limit information isn't reported back to encourage the push notification server to throttle itself a bit.
  - heisenbit 3y ago
protastus 3y ago
> Not really mentioned was all this was changed out the blue with less than 30 days to comply. The interview touches on it but it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint. It's unreasonable for a company of any size. The entire storyline shows Reddit sabotaging the process. Which seems idiotic, because they're throwing away a vibrant ecosystem that is #1 in the world, and took a decade to organically grow. A decent CEO would've made a good faith effort to monetize this rather than burn bridges.
- notaustinpowers 3y ago
  Exactly. Even in the AMA there were multiple third party devs saying they've been trying to reach out to Reddit's team to talk about signing the API agreement to continue using the service. Saying they haven't received a response in weeks. This reeks of Reddit just not even wanting to do this at all. Call up the big devs so they can say "Oh well, we tried!" and the small devs that could afford the smaller-end costs just get ignored.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >but it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint. I don't like being that pessimist "fuck capitalism" sort of user but... between the high cost, low deadlines, and unanswered responses from devs, it's pretty clear what the true intent here is. And I don't think it was a due to a lack of competence. It was very carefully planned (maybe not the scale of the reaction, but overall planned). --- And from other devs on the AMA, It's not like devs didn't know before the public announcement. One app developer mentioned trying for 3 months to get contact: >I am the developer of a third party app (Now for Reddit) which has been happily using the API for 10 years. I don't want to close down and have been considering using the paid API. However, I have been trying to contact Reddit over the last 3 months and have been completely ignored. >I have sent many emails (devapps@reddit.com) and have used the online contact form which reddit themselves have asked developers to use. Each and every time I hear nothing. >What am I supposed to do? The deadline is approaching fast, my app will be rate limited by Reddit and it will stop working. Please, reply to developers who contact you. >I feel completely powerless to do anything right now and I want to try and save the app I've been working on for the last 10 years. >I know I'm not the only developer who is being ignored, it's extremely unfair and a horrible way to be treated. (yes, as you can predict, this question did not get an answer despite being the 2ns or 3rd top comment) Now for Reddit isn't the most popular app, but 500k downloads on android alone show this wasn't just some small toy. They give a deadline of almost two months but ignore 3 months of email support. They don't want 3rd party apps.
bagels 3y ago
What is a user worth on Reddit?
Paul-Craft 3y ago
You're right on the money. It's all that, and more. Basically, Reddit going to a paid API isn't the big deal. It's the fact that, say, Apollo can pay Imgur under $200/month for all the API calls they need, but Reddit is demanding $20M/year, or ~$1.7M/month [0]. That's what tradespeople call their "fuck off" rate, i.e. the rate they'd quote someone when they don't actually want to do a job, but also don't want to come out and say they don't want to do it. The TL;DR on this whole situation is that Reddit quoted Apollo and other 3rd party apps their "fuck off" rate, and now Reddit is all like surprised Pikachu face that people who depend on those apps are, well... fucking off. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/08/popular-third-party-reddit-app-apollo-is-shutting-down-as-a-result-of-reddits-new-api-pricing/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/08/popular-third-party-reddit... Edit: $20M/year, not per month.
- tschwimmer 3y ago
  It says right in the first paragraph of your link that it was going to cost $20m per year, not per month.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    Brain fart. Fixed.
- shagie 3y ago
  The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get. https://api.imgur.com/#commercial https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing The two plans there are $500/month for 7.5M requests and $10k/month for 150M requests.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    > The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get. Sounds to me like that rate might be Imgur saying "we welcome your business," rather than "fuck off."
dotBen 3y ago
>it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint. That's the point. In business you don't say "no" you 'f#ck off' price instead. 20x is a f#ck off price. It's because they don't want 3rd clients to proliferate because of the business issues it creates BUT at 20x, if they agreed, it would benefit the balance sheet enough for the issue to go away.
wolverine876 3y ago
Of course Reddit's management knew what the outcome would be, and they chose that outcome. They wanted to clear out API users. It's not a new tactic - you can see Twitter doing it, of course, and many other businesses.
adventured 3y ago
This isn't about API costs. It was changed so rapidly due to ChatGPT 4 and how it shocked the industry. They believe time is essential, in regards to pricing up the data (GPT has indicated to the Reddit company that it has massively undervalued its text content). API pricing/use is the excuse to lock down their content asap. They see a goldmine under their own feet that others are extracting value from and so far they have not. This is all about LLMs and perceived value related to that.
- Terretta 3y ago
  This argument doesn't hold water. Licensing can charge commercial reuse differently, and technology can have 3rd party apps use OAuth, and reddit can enable that OAuth solely for users with Reddit Gold Plus, to get whatever they think they need per user. It's users using the API, to contribute the content. If Reddit stopped to think it through, they'd realize content contributed by Apollo users is better for LLMs. Finally, if it cost users to use the API, Reddit gets paid, apps compete on their own merits as they do today, and the pile miners pay for commercial harvesting of the content users paid reddit and the app builders to let them post. It's hard to see why Reddit thinks their current approach is the cleverest.
  - ryanmerket 3y ago
    It's both. They are monetizing the data with LLMs AND they are still enabling 3P developers to monetize their users by charging a small monthly fee. Let's say Apollo, Relay, or RIF charged $2/mo per user. Would that be enough to cover their expenses? Looking at Reddit's now application programming interface pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month.Google/Apple App Stores take a 15% commission on subscriptions so a total per month per customer average cost would be $0.83 cents. That means the devs would make $0.98 cents per month per user on a $2 subscription fee. (30 cents to Google, 73 cents to reddit, 98 cents left to pocket). With this user base, even if only like 20,000 people subscribe the devs stand to make $20,000 every month in profit. Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 50% conversion rate (meaning half of the users decide to subscribe) and charging $2.00 a month, he would make $750,000 / PER MONTH. That's with the new Reddit fees.

gs17 3y ago

Do they really think it's reasonable? I presumed it was meant to kill off third party clients.

redmerchant2 3y ago
I’m just following Christian’s good faith interpretation. But it’s absolutely clear it was done to kill 3P clients. It’s hilarious that certain bots would be exempt and free from the price hike. Spez called out the Haikubot by name. Look those bots are cute. But it has to query every single sub and every single comment every few minutes to work. If Reddit truly cares about waste and inefficiency those would be the first to go. The value vs cost calculus is negative.
- George83728 3y ago
  Those bots also shit up the S/N and generally disrupt conversations with useless replies nobody asked for. They're a big part of the reason I stopped using reddit. Related: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...
  - petersellers 3y ago
    Even more egregious are those stupid "RemindMe!" bots which in a very ham-fisted way create noise for everyone except the one person triggering the bot (ironically, a 3rd party app would be way better suited at implementing this specific feature)
    - PoorlyNamed 3y ago
      Apollo implemented this as a feature last year in fact.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      People have wanted schedulers and the ability to subscribe fr updates posts for years. Thankfully, RES has had that for almost a decade now. Don't think Reddit even acknowledged that feature request, compared to others they said "we're working on it" some 7 years ago. Closest they got is how the subscriber plan lets you highlight new comments in a post (something RES also had, but reddit made them remove it), but you still can't notify yourself to when new comments occur. Just another example of not considering the user. Pretty sure filtering subreddits from r/all was the last user-centric feature they made. And that was more made out of spite of the political shitshow that was 2016/7 as opposed to thinking about the users.
  - bagels 3y ago
    Has Time Cube vibes.
    - tkanarsky 3y ago
      From the great "welcome to my meme page" on FB.
      - bagels 3y ago
        Thank you, I'd never seen this genre of... absurdity before.
  - castlecrasher2 3y ago
- latortuga 3y ago
  I don't think this is inconsistent at all. Bots don't look at or click on ads. Bots don't engage or create community. Bots don't buy awards. Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people.
  - realusername 3y ago
    To my knowledge, ads and buying awards were never available from the API anyways so it's not like Reddit can use that as a valid argument
  - willis936 3y ago
    It is inconsistent because spez has repeatedly said that 3P apps, Apollo in particular, are inefficient with their API usage which is preventing reddit from becoming profitable. It is their (thinly veiled) lie to justify the pricing because they think shutting down 3P apps and being caught lying at the same time is a better PR move than just shutting down 3P apps.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >Bot querying is a drop in the ocean compared to real people. bot querying also doesn't make them any revenue, yet it is a common source of strain on the community. I imagine it also makes spam detection that much trickier. While there are some amazing bots (and ofc, automod) there are so many bots out there just to make noise. And reddit is already pretty noisy as is.
- harrelchris 3y ago
  It's either meant to kill 3rd party apps, or it's an impressive failure by Steve Huffman to create another revenue stream for Reddit.
ajmurmann 3y ago
Makes me wonder why even bother in that case to introduce phony pricing.
- gs17 3y ago
  IMO, it tries to shift the blame a little. Pretend the price is reasonable and the developers who shut down the apps instead of paying are who took your app away, not the company. Killing them outright would make the blame very clearly on Reddit's side. The other benefit is if anyone does decide to pay, it's profitable.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    They probably also didn't anticipate quite this extreme of a blowback. The response to killing 3rd party apps outright would have likely been the same as this, but when they did their calculations they probably expected the response to this to be less extreme and opted for the "safer" choice.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Except that doesn't work if every single third party app shuts down, which as far as I know is the case. That's why I roll my eyes and gag in disgust a little when I hear Reddit management and their apologists somehow try to blame Christian for not negotiating in good faith. Even if that were true (which, to be clear, I don't believe it actually is, the opposite in fact), it just means that some other developer would step up if the pricing let them continue. The fact that every other app also shut down just proves that was the entire goal of these API pricing changes in the first place.
ljm 3y ago
Even that makes little sense. Reddit has survived on volunteer moderation and their use of third party tools to manage the workload. If Reddit doesn’t want to cover the cost of that infrastructure then they’re going to incur the extra cost of hiring moderators. I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API (and thus third party clients) and since these companies see ads as a money printing scheme they’re happy to sacrifice whatever they can for it.
- curun1r 3y ago
  > I imagine they’re upset that they can’t send adverts through the API Even that doesn’t make sense. They could’ve just told app developers a) we’re going to start co-mingling ads in API responses and b) that failure to render those ads according to our guidelines will result in banning your client id. Users would still be free to purchase a premium account to avoid ads. Everyone would find that reasonable and there would’ve been no revolt. They could’ve even imposed per-user API quotas to avoid the kind of data harvesting that was being done to train LLMs. And they could’ve even threatened Christian with a ban if he didn’t improve the caching in his app, since that’s another criticism they’ve lobbed his way. All that is targeted at making 3P app users contributing members of a profitable platform. But they did none of that and, instead, quoted him an FU price that will force him to shut down.
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    This would have been plenty fair in my opinion, and may have even gotten me to buy Reddit premium. Instead I'm just walking away from the platform and my own small community of 15,000 readers that I've spent 7 years building.
    - ljm 3y ago
      I'm not sure even that Reddit has a genuine value prop beyond being a new walled garden to gather data and serve ads. But it might be too big to truly fail, now, because newer generations of internet users have only experienced the feudal internet. Once upon a time this was all served by RSS, forums, and niche websites. Reddit converted those communities to subreddits, Facebook took another slice of those. Discord and Slack portioned away other groups as did Tumblr and each one has attempted to establish a moat not just to keep competitors away, but to keep their users inside.
potatolicious 3y ago
I agree with this take - this seems pretextual rather than a good-faith attempt to charge for API access. Because history rhymes I suspect Reddit's leadership was heavily inspired by Twitter's killing of third-party clients, which actually ended up working out for Twitter. IMO Huffman's behavior in this entire saga has been extremely wanting, to the degree where one has to wonder about his suitability to lead the company. And to be clear - I'm actually someone who is sympathetic to Reddit's position, where a lot of the platform's value generation isn't being captured by them and the company is unprofitable. I'm a very long-time Reddit user but I'm generally pretty meh about the various tempests-in-a-teapot psychodramas that emerge from there, and I remain generally cool to the popular uprising rhetoric - but Huffman's behavior is pretty egregious. And this is why I don't really see this resolving peaceably - Huffman at this point seems personally aggrieved by Selig and one has to wonder if he's behaving in a capacity that maximizes the interests of his company vs. descending into a petty personal feud. I may be grossly misinterpreting him here - but based on his disastrous AMA and his haughty proclamations it's not an unreasonable perception. More importantly, as a company that is 100% reliant on mass volunteer labor to even exist, the fact that this perception has been projected, reinforced, and not usefully countered in any way suggests disqualifying leadership inability.
- tornato7 3y ago
  No matter how you look at it, Reddit leadership massively screwed this up. When half your site goes offline for two days and the entire front page is calling for the CEO's head, it's obvious that they have lost touch. And since they aren't reversing course on this, you can assume even more user-hostile changes are coming in the near future.
  - proamdev123 3y ago
    Agreed. And it’s actually 90% of the site offline at this point. And many subreddits have said they’ll be private indefinitely, not just 2 days.
    - OGWhales 3y ago
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
Isn't the whole point of this to charge AI companies harvesting reddit data? I thought 3rd party apps are collateral.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  I see this theory a lot and I'm not so sure. The Reddit API makes things easier, but with this new pricing it makes way more sense for AI companies to go back to scraping. But at the end of the day, AI companies aren't Reddit's users. Redditors don't have any reason to care about that, we have nothing to gain from Reddit charging AI companies for API access. So Reddit structing their response to AI in a way that completely dicks over so many users is never going to go over well. And it doesn't help that their CEO is acting like a petulant manchild the entire time.

ryanmerket 3y ago

Basic math? Let's do the math... Let's say Apollo, Relay, or RIF charged $2/mo per user. Would that be enough to cover their expenses? Looking at Reddit's now API pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month. Google/Apple App Stores take a 15% commission on subscriptions so a total per month per customer average cost would be $0.83 cents. That means the devs would make $0.98 cents per month per user on a $2 subscription fee. (30 cents to Google, 73 cents to reddit, 98 cents left to pocket). With this user base, even if only like 20,000 people subscribe the devs stand to make $20,000 every month in profit. The Relay for Reddit dev breaks it down here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/update_how_the_current_api_changes_would_impact/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/upd... Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 50% conversion rate (meaning half of the users decide to subscribe) and charging $2.00 a month, he would make $750,000 / PER MONTH. That's with the new Reddit fees. More: https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/comment/jnt6ies/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/com...

tyg13 3y ago
50% conversion is laughably high. The number of people in that Relay thread saying they wouldn't pay for the app was unsurprising to me. Not to mention that 3rd party apps would still not have access to NSFW content. I'd be surprised if the conversion rate was as high as 10%. The estimate I saw for current subscribers ($1/month) to Apollo was 50k which is a little over 3% of users.
- ryanmerket 3y ago
  Even if it was 10% he's still printing cash for a lifestyle business. That 1% is an optional $1.49/mo. If it's a mandatory $2.99/mo you're looking at 10-20% easy. And he's printing cash.
  - tyg13 3y ago
    Still way too high. Also, the actual figure I saw from the Apollo dev (different from the Relay dev's numbers) was 345 API calls per day per user, which changes your math significantly. The other issue was that 30 days notice is not even close to enough time to pivot in terms of business model. He mentioned he has significant operating costs already, due to paying for caching servers as well as part-time help. Not only does he already have to refund users who paid for year-long subscriptions, but he'd also have to turn around and ask them for almost double the money for the same service. The fact that he's shuttering his business entirely (thus foregoing all potential profit) rather than "printing money" as you put it, makes me think he has a good reason to think his financial situation is a lot more untenable than your rough analysis would indicate.

googlryas 3y ago

Why does there need to be a paid API, when reddit provides all of the content over a free HTTP API to user agents already? Are these apps more than just a custom user agent?

paddw 3y ago
The free API is going away
- wtallis 3y ago
  I think he was trying to be clever by referring to the standard web interface as the free HTTP API, which is true to a limited extent. It's a poorly-designed and unstable API. The use of the unpopular term "user agent" may have made it harder to understand, but I appreciate almost any opportunity to bring that term back, because it has important implications that "web browser" lacks.
- googlryas 3y ago
  The free HTTP API I'm talking about is just GET / HTTP/1.0...aka the web interface offered by reddit.com on port 80 or 443
- unmole 3y ago
  It isn't. > Rate limits for the free tier > All others will continue to access the Reddit Data API without cost, in accordance with our Developer Terms, at this time. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...
nlarew 3y ago
There are two Reddit APIs - the public REST API and a private GraphQL API which limits access. Third-party apps use the REST API and the Reddit website/app use GQL. For a hobby project you could maybe get away with scraping a GQL bearer token and issuing requests as if you were an official Reddit client. Or you could even request the HTML and scrape that. At the scale of these third party apps that approach just wouldn't work.

jarym 3y ago

Also the normal way to introduce pricing to free services is to make it initially super-cheap so the majority will find it reasonable. Then overtime increase prices as you get a better sense of value and market dynamics. Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart. It’s now some governments go with taxation before u-turning some years later when they’ve driven away or killed whatever it is they were hoping to tax.

mynameisvlad 3y ago
That’s assuming that you want people to use your API for third party apps. Reddit has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in that, despite the things they say. In that sense, it makes perfect sense to jack up the price to a shocking level to force everyone to stop without outright banning them.
- revscat 3y ago
  I’m not so sure. I think Huffman saw all the hype around ChatGPT, and how they trained their model on Reddit comments, and had a fantasy about charging AI companies high rates for future API usage. Apollo, et. al., were an afterthought, if consideration was given to them at all.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    That's certainly fair, but you'd hope that out of the 2000 employees, at least some are in a position to evaluate decisions like that and explicitly calculate the PR risk of any decision. And they certainly should have taken it into account.
    - gknoy 3y ago
      Not only that, if they really didn't want to kill 3rd party apps, they've had a week to say, "oh no! We see exactly how this is going to kill third party apps, let's iterate to try to fix it so that we don't do that", instead of doubling down on a feud with them.

paxys 3y ago

> It would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth Are you implying that a user is worth $0.125/mo to Reddit? Because that is laughably inaccurate. Mature platforms like Facebook extract up to $60 per user per quarter in advertising revenue from developed countries. Reddit itself made an estimated $500M+ from ads last year. ~$2.50/mo is already more than fair. Thinking that Reddit owes full data access to anyone for pennies is absurd.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I think the question is how much money they apps can make from having users, not Reddit.
- paxys 3y ago
  The apps can make whatever they charge. $2.50 is now the base cost to add to every subscription. If the users value the service they will pay. Developers already pay Apple & Google 30% for the privilege of being in the app stores. Is it too much for the very service that is powering your entire app to ask for their own cut?
  - darknessmonk 3y ago
    > Developers already pay Apple & Google 30% for the privilege of being in the app stores. Is it too much for the very service that is powering your entire app to ask for their own cut? Mind you that price is just part of the problem - the 30-day to start charging, was just as bad. It's absurd and completely made to kill the 3PS. Maybe if they have maintained the price but gave time for apps to discuss/adapt/replan, they could have found other options.
  - Marsymars 3y ago
    Even granting the rest of your argument, that math stops working for users who don’t use a particular app as their primary/only method to access reddit. I use reddit 80% on the web, 10% on iOS and 10% on Android. I’m not going to pay reddit that full $2.50 (plus app store cut) for 10% of my usage twice. I’m just going to stop using reddit on mobile and stick to the web. The “pay for reddit premium and get ad-free reddit plus unrestricted third-party app use” model makes more sense for users, for third party apps, and for reddit.

lacker 3y ago

Why is this rate absurd? From the article, it says Reddit would charge Apollo $2.50 per user per month. Right now, ad-free YouTube costs $12 a month, ad-free Twitch costs $12 a month. I can't buy ad-free Twitter at any price. Is it really not worth $2.50 a month to have ad-free Reddit? Personally, I like Apollo, and I would be willing to pay to keep an ad-free Reddit experience. I'm disappointed that the two sides didn't manage to work this out. I feel like Reddit is getting attacked despite being the company that is trying the hardest to make this work. The standard approach is just to ban apps that compete with the in-house app. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, all of those services just completely forbid things like Apollo. All these complaints are going to encourage companies to simply ban alternate apps rather than trying to price an API in the future.

tmpz22 3y ago
The new rate would require Apollo to monetize its entire userbase which includes a large number of free users and life-time-membership users in addition to increasing rates for existing subscribers. Further switching to the reddit-model would require turning their back on free users with disabilities. So while it is practical to shell out many of the principals behind the Apollo project in order to meet Reddit's IPO stat-padding requirements, the developer has chosen to shut down.
mynameisvlad 3y ago
I mean, if by “trying the hardest” you mean “saying they’re trying the hardest while not outright banning apps” then sure, I guess they tried the hardest. They’ve made it pretty clear they’re not really trying to keep apps. Several developers in the Huffman interview pointed out that they’ve reached out for months if not years to absolute silence in return.
neura 3y ago
You're comparing video streaming services (one of them a live streaming service) that have far more cost per user, to something that has far more minimal costs. You're also comparing individual account cost per user that includes much more than just API access. Where is your evidence or even subjective knowledge about Reddit being the company that's trying the hardest to make this work? Also, to answer your initial question, regardless of anything else in your comment, the rate is absurd because it clearly falls under bait and switch. Build up your userbase, including offering your content from an API until you're basically the monopoly in your market and then start charging per month, per user, for API access. It's not like individual users are paying for their API access and feeding that API key to other apps to use. It's clearly meant to crush 3rd party apps, not facilitate Reddit making money through 3rd party apps. They can make far more money through their own massively ad infested app without providing any of the features that make other apps attractive, if they just crush 3rd party apps. In which case, why both charging for the API. As others have suggested, why not just shut it down or limit it? Simply because they want to appear as if they're not shutting out the world, while still doing exactly that.

judge2020 3y ago

In one of Christian's posts, reddit agreed that the price was for the opportunity cost of serving that user without ads - since they're not going to get any ad money from these users (and are unwilling to serve ads to these 3p clients since they probably can't guarantee to advertisers the 3p app isn't doing anything shady like hiding the ad while logging an impression).

ericbarrett 3y ago
Something I've been wondering—why couldn't the API just send a batch of ads to be served with the content? Since the apps need an authorized API key, if they don't cooperate in showing the ads then Reddit could simply threaten revocation. Then users who want "premium" could pay for whatever feature Reddit-side to allow an ad-free experience, or they could even partner with the third party apps to offer it for a cut of the fee. (This is assuming Reddit is negotiating in good faith, though that seems to be in question.)
- phire 3y ago
  They probably did not negotiate in good faith. But.... I understand the API that the 3rd party apps interact with is powered by the legacy platform. The same platform that powers old reddit. It doesn't seem like reddit are updating that platform anymore (I haven't noticed any major changes to old reddit in years), and I really don't think it has the ability to serve the same ads that the new reddit platform does. It would take a major refactor to either replicate the full API over to the new platform or otherwise feed ads back to it. BTW, this also raises questions about how much longer reddit will keep old reddit running. It really looks like they are planning to retire the old platform all-together.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Because ads still need all the privacy-invading telemetry from the client device, which these apps wouldn't want to participate in.
  - randomdata 3y ago

bottlepalm 3y ago

It's funny when I design my own public apps, I'm careful about API usage. I can only imagine what an app is like that was designed with no API limits whatsoever. It's kind of amazing Reddit ever allowed this sort of no limits API usage - while at the same time Apollo charged their own users while enjoying zero infrastructure costs. What a steal.

lights0123 3y ago
How is 345 calls/day—much lower than the official app's usage—that much when the server indicates that 60 calls/minute is all good?
- bottlepalm 3y ago
  When I use the website, my costs are covered by seeing ads. Now I have to watch more ads to make up for API users who don't pay.
  - brokenmachine 3y ago
    I use Adblock, so don't forget you're making up for me too.
- shagie 3y ago
  The mobile client may be 345 calls/day. The backend server push server is a bit more active at about 600 calls/hour/user. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13_rejected/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13... > For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs. That 345 calls/day is again mentioned https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1734 https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1734 but shortly afterwards ( https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1772 ) he describes the process for push notifications (10 days ago - this isn't just the 1.3 release from 5 years ago): > I guess there's an analogy um the way Reddit notifications work just for your inbox like you got a message or something um they work in so far as if I the developer of the app want to um say make sure that you get that notification within 10 seconds I have to be checking Reddit every 10 seconds to go like is there anything new is there anything new? is there anything new? is there anything new? okay. There is okay I'll tell is there anything new and then just repeating that at nauseam so you can imagine if you get a message once a week I'm checking every 10 seconds and then once during that whole week I get that message and then I can send it to you um so 99.99 of those API calls were wasted so we've talked to Reddit like that my friend who works on my server um and myself and I've said like what would be so much better is if we could just kind of keep like a port open with Reddit and say like you just tell us when there's a notification ready and we'll beam it off we don't have to bug you all the time and it's logical right and that's how a lot of services do it it's like an event-based API and um that's just not something reddit's ever uh given us He's making a lot more than 345 calls per day per user.

raydev 3y ago

> it would charge devs over 20x what a user actually cost/were worth This is Selig's estimate based on not much info. Numbers like "20x" are completely made up.

KptMarchewa 3y ago
Do you really think reddit spends 2.50 monthly per user on their 430 million MAU? That would mean 13 billion dollars in expenses yearly.
- tornato7 3y ago
  Reddit should realistically charge for lost revenue rather than lost expenses. Instagram makes $50B annual revenue on 2 billion users, or around $25/user/year. I'm certain that Reddit is making nowhere near that per user, but they're probably pricing their API along their most optimistic projections.
  - shbooms 3y ago
    I can't find the source but in some of the communication Selig released between him and Reddit a few days ago, Reddit themselves confirmed that their pricing is based on lost oppurtunity cost per user, not just expenses
- raydev 3y ago
  I don’t really think of any number, because that would be silly. None of us know the answer nor can we confidently estimate what it is. Therefore any attempt to justify or argue costs by us is useless.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    We can confidently assume it's not 26x their annual revenue. That would be silly.
dsr_ 3y ago
Based on the info that Reddit had disclosed earlier, it might be inaccurate today but it's not fair to say "completely made up" -- unless Reddit made it up.

xyst 3y ago

Agree. Before subreddit mods voluntarily blacked out, the Apollo developer stated he would pay millions of dollars per year ($20M/year?) with the increased rates. It’s insane. Reddit C-level executives suggested Apollo was poorly optimized or something. I think if it truly costs that much to use Reddit’s API, then maybe it’s on reddit to make their backend more efficient. If that’s not the case then it’s clearly just another case of corporate greed and pumping the numbers for the IPO. I really hope the blackout is sustained for longer than 2 days. People need a break from social media and their echo chambers. Plus only 2 days of decreased user activity is nothing to Reddit. It will stay relevant for 1-2 news cycles. C-level executives brush it off to board as “turbulence”. Then it’s back to business of extracting as much value from the users

klodolph 3y ago
> I think if it truly costs that much to use Reddit’s API, then maybe it’s on reddit to make their backend more efficient. I am a bit skeptical that efficiency is part of the formula here. Reddit's running an entire company here, and I'm guessing that API call efficiency is only a small part of the cost (considering that they serve things that cost real money, like video).
shagie 3y ago
$0.24/1k calls isn't absurd (its expensive, yes, but only ~3x more than the rate for Imgur). The issue is that Apollo was doing 600 calls per hour per user to push notifications with a less than 10 second window between "when it hits your mailbox" to "when it shows up on your iDevice". When that 600 calls per hour per user gets billed at $0.24/1k calls it gets very expensive. If those calls were done to the main application (not showing ads) at the same rate that the official application does, it would represent several million dollars of lost advertising revenue. On the other hand, it represents a fairly consistent load on the servers that doesn't generate any revenue that can misbehave quite badly when there is an outage and per user rate limit information isn't reported back to encourage the push notification server to throttle itself a bit.
- heisenbit 3y ago

protastus 3y ago

> Not really mentioned was all this was changed out the blue with less than 30 days to comply. The interview touches on it but it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint. It's unreasonable for a company of any size. The entire storyline shows Reddit sabotaging the process. Which seems idiotic, because they're throwing away a vibrant ecosystem that is #1 in the world, and took a decade to organically grow. A decent CEO would've made a good faith effort to monetize this rather than burn bridges.

notaustinpowers 3y ago
Exactly. Even in the AMA there were multiple third party devs saying they've been trying to reach out to Reddit's team to talk about signing the API agreement to continue using the service. Saying they haven't received a response in weeks. This reeks of Reddit just not even wanting to do this at all. Call up the big devs so they can say "Oh well, we tried!" and the small devs that could afford the smaller-end costs just get ignored.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>but it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint. I don't like being that pessimist "fuck capitalism" sort of user but... between the high cost, low deadlines, and unanswered responses from devs, it's pretty clear what the true intent here is. And I don't think it was a due to a lack of competence. It was very carefully planned (maybe not the scale of the reaction, but overall planned). --- And from other devs on the AMA, It's not like devs didn't know before the public announcement. One app developer mentioned trying for 3 months to get contact: >I am the developer of a third party app (Now for Reddit) which has been happily using the API for 10 years. I don't want to close down and have been considering using the paid API. However, I have been trying to contact Reddit over the last 3 months and have been completely ignored. >I have sent many emails (devapps@reddit.com) and have used the online contact form which reddit themselves have asked developers to use. Each and every time I hear nothing. >What am I supposed to do? The deadline is approaching fast, my app will be rate limited by Reddit and it will stop working. Please, reply to developers who contact you. >I feel completely powerless to do anything right now and I want to try and save the app I've been working on for the last 10 years. >I know I'm not the only developer who is being ignored, it's extremely unfair and a horrible way to be treated. (yes, as you can predict, this question did not get an answer despite being the 2ns or 3rd top comment) Now for Reddit isn't the most popular app, but 500k downloads on android alone show this wasn't just some small toy. They give a deadline of almost two months but ignore 3 months of email support. They don't want 3rd party apps.

bagels 3y ago

What is a user worth on Reddit?

Paul-Craft 3y ago

You're right on the money. It's all that, and more. Basically, Reddit going to a paid API isn't the big deal. It's the fact that, say, Apollo can pay Imgur under $200/month for all the API calls they need, but Reddit is demanding $20M/year, or ~$1.7M/month [0]. That's what tradespeople call their "fuck off" rate, i.e. the rate they'd quote someone when they don't actually want to do a job, but also don't want to come out and say they don't want to do it. The TL;DR on this whole situation is that Reddit quoted Apollo and other 3rd party apps their "fuck off" rate, and now Reddit is all like surprised Pikachu face that people who depend on those apps are, well... fucking off. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/08/popular-third-party-reddit-app-apollo-is-shutting-down-as-a-result-of-reddits-new-api-pricing/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/08/popular-third-party-reddit... Edit: $20M/year, not per month.

tschwimmer 3y ago
It says right in the first paragraph of your link that it was going to cost $20m per year, not per month.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  Brain fart. Fixed.
shagie 3y ago
The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get. https://api.imgur.com/#commercial https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing The two plans there are $500/month for 7.5M requests and $10k/month for 150M requests.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  > The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get. Sounds to me like that rate might be Imgur saying "we welcome your business," rather than "fuck off."

dotBen 3y ago

>it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint. That's the point. In business you don't say "no" you 'f#ck off' price instead. 20x is a f#ck off price. It's because they don't want 3rd clients to proliferate because of the business issues it creates BUT at 20x, if they agreed, it would benefit the balance sheet enough for the issue to go away.

wolverine876 3y ago

Of course Reddit's management knew what the outcome would be, and they chose that outcome. They wanted to clear out API users. It's not a new tactic - you can see Twitter doing it, of course, and many other businesses.

adventured 3y ago

This isn't about API costs. It was changed so rapidly due to ChatGPT 4 and how it shocked the industry. They believe time is essential, in regards to pricing up the data (GPT has indicated to the Reddit company that it has massively undervalued its text content). API pricing/use is the excuse to lock down their content asap. They see a goldmine under their own feet that others are extracting value from and so far they have not. This is all about LLMs and perceived value related to that.

Terretta 3y ago
This argument doesn't hold water. Licensing can charge commercial reuse differently, and technology can have 3rd party apps use OAuth, and reddit can enable that OAuth solely for users with Reddit Gold Plus, to get whatever they think they need per user. It's users using the API, to contribute the content. If Reddit stopped to think it through, they'd realize content contributed by Apollo users is better for LLMs. Finally, if it cost users to use the API, Reddit gets paid, apps compete on their own merits as they do today, and the pile miners pay for commercial harvesting of the content users paid reddit and the app builders to let them post. It's hard to see why Reddit thinks their current approach is the cleverest.
- ryanmerket 3y ago
  It's both. They are monetizing the data with LLMs AND they are still enabling 3P developers to monetize their users by charging a small monthly fee. Let's say Apollo, Relay, or RIF charged $2/mo per user. Would that be enough to cover their expenses? Looking at Reddit's now application programming interface pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month.Google/Apple App Stores take a 15% commission on subscriptions so a total per month per customer average cost would be $0.83 cents. That means the devs would make $0.98 cents per month per user on a $2 subscription fee. (30 cents to Google, 73 cents to reddit, 98 cents left to pocket). With this user base, even if only like 20,000 people subscribe the devs stand to make $20,000 every month in profit. Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 50% conversion rate (meaning half of the users decide to subscribe) and charging $2.00 a month, he would make $750,000 / PER MONTH. That's with the new Reddit fees.