[ammut]

The post by the Apollo dev made it sound like they had gone back and forth for a while before the final pricing was laid out. I wonder why reddit didn't come up with a price that worked for all parties. Isn't some money better than none + ill will from the community?

[wingworks]

They don't want the money, they want the 3rd party apps gone, and for users to use the offical app.

[pacetherace]

In the recent AMA, they claimed that the average cost per user would be around $1/month. Apollo dev believes it will be much more than.

I feel Reddit could have easily come up with a model where the API usage gets tied to premium account and that decouples apps from API charges.

Reddit has now created a new problem for itself which is that a huge user base that previously didn't bother to look at third-party apps has suddenly become aware of third-party apps. So now, they will start bypassing Reddit's official apps that generate revenue for Reddit in favor of third-party apps that seemingly have a better UX and are ad-free.

[nocoiner]

Well, maybe, but the API is free only until the end of the month, so… seems like a very temporary problem for Reddit (assuming that the mods generally fold, as I assume they likely will).

[paxys]

I highly doubt a different dollar amount would have changed the outcome. Reddit wanted $2.50 per user from the Apollo dev. Would $2 have been more palatable? Or $1.50? Would the extra few cents per month really make the difference between a user subscribing or not?

The conversation is really only about free vs not free. Everything else is a smokescreen.

[nocoiner]

Eh, at some threshold, of course a lower price would have changed the outcome. It sounds like the Apollo dev thought API costs came in at 10-20x what he’d been expecting. I think there’s obviously a huge difference between paying Reddit, say, 50 cents of a $3 net payment (assuming a sub for the app is $5/month) and having a $5/user/month cover charge to Reddit as the price of admission, and then having to build a viable app business over that. Seems dubious.

[8note]

A change in start time would be more impactful, so that he could ramp up charging his users