The content of the reddit post:
Hey everyone, I just had another call with Reddit and wanted to share what I’ve heard, even though I haven’t made any concrete decisions yet on how to proceed. (Previous update
They confirmed to me the new cost of 3rd party apps accessing the site, which is exactly what the Apollo dev revealed – for every 50 million requests they want $12,000.
They won’t be making exceptions for free apps.
The Apollo dev (/u/iamthatis) estimated that the new pricing would cost him $20m per year. I raised this with Reddit – they said that his calculations were “totally wrong”, but they were unable to discuss why. Given that the Apollo dev literally just multiplied the cost by the number of requests, I have trouble seeing how this could be wrong.
I did some back-of-envelope calculations, and the equivalent cost for RedReader could be something like $1 million per year. Since I don’t track users it’s hard to get an exact figure.
Most of the conversation focused on the ridiculously high cost. They said that they didn’t think the costs were high, but were in fact “on parity” with the rest of the non-third-party-app userbase. This contadicts the public calculations by the Apollo dev, who estimates that they are charging more than 20x an optimistic estimate of their typical per-user revenue.
I raised the question of why paid API users will be unable to access NSFW content, whereas other users will have access to all content, meaning that those paying the most for access will be treated as second class citizens. They said that they were unable to discuss the reasons for this.
They reiterated that their goal “isn’t to kill 3rd party apps” – in fact, they said they were “confused” by claims that they want to do that, and that if they wanted to kill off those apps, there would be “literally nothing stopping them” just doing it directly. I pointed out that regardless of what their motives are, the end result is the same – the apps will be killed off.
Also, I have previously pointed out their dependence on the community doing free work for them (creating and moderating content), and how the users who contribute in that way are the ones most likely to be using 3rd party apps. I don’t get the impression that this bothers them – it all seems to come down to revenue.
I’ve raised the point of accessibility with them, as I’ve heard from many blind users that use RedReader due to how it’s optimised for screen readers (thanks in part to the excellent work by /u/codeofdusk and other contributors). I’m waiting to hear back from them about this.
It’s difficult to imagine any sustainable, official path forward with Reddit as a result of these changes, and personally I’m not at all inclined to invest any more of my time in their platform, or drive any more traffic to it.
Right now I’m considering the possibility of modifying the app to connect to a Reddit alternative such as Lemmy or Mastodon. There would be something very satisfying about some of the bigger Reddit apps driving their userbase to alternative sites too, and if this helped one of those platforms gain traction then that would be a step in the right direction.
Just a quick note on some of the other possibilities:
Charge a subscription to use RedReader: I have been considering this as a possibility, however due to the incredibly high pricing, and the fact that only the most dedicated (and costly) users with the highest usage would sign up, I think this would quickly become unsustainable.
Everyone uses their own personal developer key: It’s too early to know whether this will be a realistic option. From what I’ve seen, Reddit may be turning developer signups into a manual process where each user would need to message them and get approval. Also it’s likely they’d crack down on this if they knew it was happening.
Scrape the website rather than use the API: This is possible and there’s plenty of legal precedent that it would be fine, however it’s an extremely high-maintenance approach that means we’ll forever be playing a cat-and-mouse game with Reddit. I suspect that even if I don’t go down this route, someone else will eventually fork the app and do it anyway!
I haven’t made any concrete decisions yet, but I’ll keep you all updated. I read every message on the previous thread, and really appreciate all the support and feedback.
The only possible explanation I can see for why the Apollo dev’s number could be “wrong” is if reddit plans to charge on a sliding scale, i.e. the more requests, the more the price is reduced per request. Or the other possibility would be that they “negotiate” a rate with the app developer, i.e. “determine how popular your app will be based on the cost barrier to entry”.
My guess is that Reddit is alluding to the stupid suggestion of “just make your app more efficient with requests bro” (paraphrasing) that I saw an admin make. Reddit’s already said they’re not open to negotiations.
And then the Apollo dev proceeded to packet sniff the official app and found their API call usage to be something like 50% higher than his own lol. The gaslighting by Reddit is another layer of insult on top of the already insulting price for API requests.
Yeah the gaslighting is really off-putting, especially after seeing the Snazzy Labs interview with the Apollo dev (Christian) where he said they used to have a great working relationship. I don’t understand how this went to shit so fast.
Money!
That’s hilarious. What a cluster. If they want more performant API calls than maybe they should expose something like a graphql endpoint. Otherwise there’s only so much you can optimise through a REST interface.
It’s pretty clear Reddit wants to kill 3rd party apps while claiming to love third party apps and trying to extort money from third party apps
Christian would not make this mistake, he has been careful with this and have been tracking it for a while. It’s a make or break thing for Apollo, and all 3rd party apps and I am pretty sure an intentional move from Reddit. They will try to gaslight everyone until the make it to the ipo.