this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Just goes to show that they were intending to kill 3PAs from the start.
That's the only logical conclusion. Wouldn't really make sense otherwise.
You would think that more users means more money for reddit. But I think that might be wrong. I can only assume that 3rd party apps make up a small portion of their daily active users (a metric they likely use to sell ad space). And 3rd party apps aren't giving reddit any ad revenue. On top of that maintaining the API and support for 3rd party apps costs money. From a business perspective it probably makes a lot of sense to start charging for use.
Most of the 3PA devs has already said, they are not against paying for API usage, as long as it’s a reasonable price. The pricing Reddit wants is definitely to kill 3PA.
Yeah the calculation made by users, based on Reddit's general estimates, was around $7.50 per user per month. In this case, a $10 per month subscription for every user would likely fully cover the API costs.
Judging by the "$20 million a year" calculation the Apollo dev made, Reddit's charging around $1,666,666.66 per month.
Any 3PA would need over 222k users a month (with average-to-heavy usage) to justify that price. Ain't no way any single 3PA has that many users.
From what I heard 20% of the userbase was using 3PA. Not an insignificant amount at all.
@Da_Boom
@AdamEatsAss
And that 20% likely accounts for the overwhelming majority of the quality content on Reddit.