I want to debunk Reddit's claims, and talk about their unwillingness to work with developers, moderators, and the larger community, as well as say thank you for all the support
I want to debunk Reddit's claims, and talk about their unwillingness to work with developers, moderators, and the larger community, as well as say thank you for all the support
I wanted to address Reddit's continued, provably false statements, as well as answer some questions from the community, and also just say...
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There are lots of mistakes Reddit made that shows they aren't trying.
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They could have given more advance notice for the API price increase. This would give apps more time to update their code to use fewer API calls. Many apps are subscription-based, so it would give them more time to update their subscription price.
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The price should have been based on Reddit's actual costs, actual revenue, and actual profits. I.e., if it costs Reddit $0.10 per user per year and their revenue per user is $0.15 per user per year from ads, then the API price should have been $0.15-$0.25 per user per year. The actual pricing shows they made it artificially high to kill the 3rd party apps. (I don't know what the actual numbers are.)
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Even if Reddit really did want to charge $5 per month for API users, the right way to do it is to start from a lower price and increase it 20%-50% per year until they get to their target price.
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If a user had Reddit premium, they should have been given extra API call tokens they can give to their 3rd party app.
Yup, this shows they aren't interested in finding a balance between making the website a good experience for the users and profitability, they're just trying to min-max squeezing every last drop of monetization from the users they can. Even then, they could have been smarter about it.
I'm not sure it's even max monetization. If they said "For $2/month, you get no ads and you can give your favorite app 10,000 calls a month.", that probably would have been more revenue.
I believe I read $0.24 per
5001000 API calls somewhere, which is insanely high.It is insanely high, when their actual cost for 500 API calls should be $0.001 or less.
My girlfriend, who has been somewhat on the fence about the protests (just because she's a more casual user and has never had any issues with the official app), absolutely balked at that number and I think that singlehandedly changed her mind about the API changes.
$12 per 50,000,000 calls is the figure Selig mentions.
Oops, I left out the letter 'k'.
Typo? This Ars article claims it's $12k per 50M calls and Christian's original post has $0.24 per 1000 calls listed, which adds up.
The price they gave was $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. I quickly inputted this in my app, and saw that it was not far off Twitter's outstandingly high API prices, at $12,000, and with my current usage would cost almost $2 million dollars per month, or over $20 million per year.
Oops, of course I did mean $12,000, yes. I had said $12 per 50,000 and somehow edited it to be incorrect.
All good, I misquoted it at first as well :)
Could they have differentiated pricing between apps that helped build / give back to the community and API requests which were just harvesting data?
Alternatively they could have milked the community more effectively by slowly boiling the frog as more effective companies and governments do.
Slowly ramp API prices over a period of time so the apps die off and most user’s begrudgingly accept the changes without a cliff edge which leads to protests and a mass exodus
From a personal point of view I am pleased for the nudge I needed to move out of corporate social media.
That's pretty standard licensing. "If you're using the API to train an AI model, the price is $100. If you're making an app for regular users, the price is $0.01."
I think a smol problem here is that Apollo offered a "Lifetime Subscription" for a flat amount. In order to honor that Christian would be obliged to take money from elsewhere to cover those subscriptions, potentially for decades.
I'm a lifetime subscription holder and I would have, without a doubt, been fine with having my flat amount cover a few months of the new model, then switching over to the per month amount needed to keep Apollo running. But that wasn't even offered!
He just decided that he'd had enough and pulled the plug.
I don't blame him, he'd have to start over on his project he's worked on for years. I wouldn't want to do it either lol
No, he wouldn't. He'd have to start passing on the cost of the new API pricing + his fair share as dev, to the users of Apollo. Nothing about how the app currently functions would have to change, just the amount users pay to use the app under the new pricing.
He never even offered that as an option. (Not that I've seen or been told by him as a subscriber.) He apparently decided that doing so wasn't worth it and pulled the plug. And to be clear, as the app developer that's fully his right and I support his decision.
I'm old enough to know that sometimes in life you've just "had it," and it's time to walk away.
he said some of his busy users would cost $15-20/mo. That's definitely too much for most people for something like this
It's crystal clear that Reddit wants 3PAs gone. No point trying to work with them when they'll be making it an uphill battle the whole way.
Besides the pricing, the other big change is that NSFW content will no longer be available via API. It's been kind of overshadowed by everything else, but even if the pricing was reasonable, how the app currently functions would still be changing.
I feel for him too.
I think one of the big issues for him was monetary liability. Even if he did pass the API costs on to willing users, he still wasn’t going to be making much -if any- more money.
It’s kinda like somebody offering you $1 to get a $20 bill across the street safely - vs - someone offering you $1 to get $20,000 across the street safely.
If something went wrong with the $20, then no big deal. But if something went wrong with the $20,000, then oh shit. A dollar isn’t worth that headache.
Same thing with Apollo going completely sub based at $5 or $10 a month. If something was slightly off about his accounting or API call guesstimates or anything else, he could easily be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars that the subscription fees didn’t cover that month or quarter or year.
I would’t be able to sleep like that.
Very valid point. Thank you!
Reddit has charged this in such a way that it makes 3rd party apps unsustainable to run - no point offering something that isn't remotely competitive.
I think I misread the comment, I thought you were asking why he doesn't just make an app for Lemmy. Sorry, just woke up
He explained that 30 days was not enough to design and roll out a whole new pricing scheme, and he would have to start paying the increased fee for all his existing lifetime subscribers, in the hopes that enough people would subscribe to the new schemes to offset the cost.
A change like that is not something you undertake lightly.
I think the writing is on the wall that the days of 3rd party reddit apps are numbered. I ran a moderately successful site from an API one time (Etsy) and we were always waiting for them to somehow screw us over. It happened here and there (sudden feature discontinuation, reliability problems) but they never 100% declared "you have to stop", even when we were doing it before they had an official open API. But We knew they -could- do that at any time and it made it feel shakey. I think he's right to quit now and cut his losses vs. keep working on it and become more dependent upon reddit.
The bigger problem is that Selig and other developers have an actual conscience and understood that the pricing for the new model would be way too high (in the ballpark of $20-$25 per month per user) to even cover the costs.
Not only that but he would lose around 2m per month in the rollover while ending life time and long term subscriptions bringing up the costs another 250k. Just to change it to a model that very few would pay for.
Instead he decided to cut losses, terminate the subscriptions and not owe 2m per month.
Honestly they could've just make third party apps only available to premium users.
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