All the 3pa’s shut down business the moment the actual API prices were announced. This wasn’t a protest move, the prices were simply 20 times higher than what they were promised and impossible to work into their business model. Reddit couldn’t have overcharged and continued as normal - it was a deliberate move to kill off 3pa while pretending they are not. Reddit COULD have charged this API price to users directly via Reddit Premium, but failed to do so.
I think it also important to note that it wasn’t just the pricing itself, which was indeed already heinous, but that the rate calculation changed. It used to be a rate per user per app (apikey+oauth) but they changed that to just the per app … that then has a multiplicative effect on the costs and makes the “free tier” they were talking about especially pointless…
It would be easy for an app to start at free tier … not have much growth through word of mouth but enough given the per app rates to push it over boundary points … and then be due a significant and unavoidable invoice in a couple of months…
I suspect they could’ve overcharged still, but just shut their mouths and continued as normal. Each new tactic is awful and self harming.
All the 3pa’s shut down business the moment the actual API prices were announced. This wasn’t a protest move, the prices were simply 20 times higher than what they were promised and impossible to work into their business model. Reddit couldn’t have overcharged and continued as normal - it was a deliberate move to kill off 3pa while pretending they are not. Reddit COULD have charged this API price to users directly via Reddit Premium, but failed to do so.
I think it also important to note that it wasn’t just the pricing itself, which was indeed already heinous, but that the rate calculation changed. It used to be a rate per user per app (apikey+oauth) but they changed that to just the per app … that then has a multiplicative effect on the costs and makes the “free tier” they were talking about especially pointless…
It would be easy for an app to start at free tier … not have much growth through word of mouth but enough given the per app rates to push it over boundary points … and then be due a significant and unavoidable invoice in a couple of months…