Reddit will begin charging for access to its API (nytimes.com) 303 points by alexrustic 51 days ago | 339 comments --- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35617763
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe... was posted April 19th.
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/2023apiupdates
> ANNOUNCEMENTS Staff • April 18, 2023
> ...
> To ensure developers have the tools and information they need to continue to use Reddit safely, protect our users’ privacy and security, and adhere to local regulations, we’re making updates to the ways some can access the Reddit Data API:
> We are introducing a new premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.
The prices themselves were announced May 30th. I guess if you’re feeling generous, that would be 32 days notice.
He had notice there would be a change and was explicitly told:
> The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it's not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they're looking to do equitable pricing based in reality. They mentioned that they were not looking to be like Twitter, which has API pricing so high it was publicly ridiculed.
There is absolutely no actionable information there, and everything they said indicated that it wouldn’t be an unreasonable change.
30 days is ample notice to Apollo's users.
Apollo has had since April to figure out how to make a monthly subscription work, on a technical level. Now... having done nothing smart in the meantime, are left with very little time to make the changes. That is 100% on Apollo.
You shift the blame like there’s no tomorrow. At this point you either work for them, or are getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to defend them. That’s the only reasonable explanation for why you’d be pushing the blame so hard.
Even if he had a full system set up in a month and a half (a fairly tight deadline), 32 days is an unreasonably short amount of time to make any sort of material change to your terms, let alone raising the cost exorbitantly.
Hilariously, your first comment wishes people would pledge to pay for Apollo. How we got from there to… this bullshit is beyond me. At least it only took a few hours to show your true colors.
Your "32 days" timeline you keep going on about is false no matter what way you look at it.
Apollo has known since April API pricing was coming, and there was no way their existing "pay once, use it forever" or even the $12.99 per year model was going to be sustainable - particularly given how many free users they float monthly.
Not knowing the exact fee in advance is completely irrelevant. The infrastructure needed to be built to support a monthly subscription model, freemium models, or whatever they needed to do to pivot and remain in business.
100% of the reason people use Apollo is because of the data and community Reddit has built. Apollo basically leached off that data, and made a profit while doing so. Any sound business operator would understand and plan for risks that endanger their business. Apollo failed to take action in a timely manner, and failed to mitigate risks to it's business.
Now they're being asked to pay for the API access that makes Apollo's business possible - and even if the API fees were 1/4 of the proposed amount, Apollo was going to need to change their model. That is the point you, and many others seem to be missing - Apollo was not going to survive paying anything for API access - Apollo had no plan.
I cannot make it any more clear - Apollo failed to plan for, and mitigate risks and failed to take corrective actions in time to save their business.
Apollo was run like a hobby side-project - not a business.
https://apolloapp.io/pro-ultra/
Apparently Apollo has paid subscriptions as a way to finance it.
He would have to turn off the functionality if there is no subscription in order to avoid spending too much for API calls.
Currently this subscription is described as:
> second is Apollo Ultra, the highest tier, which includes everything in Apollo Pro plus additional features. Apollo Ultra is a subscription offering of $1.49 USD per month (or $12.99/year, or a lifetime unlock option is offered in the app) and is a subscription due to options within it having ongoing monthly costs to me, the developer.
The approach would be to do a subscription price change for Apollo Ultra from $1.49/month to $10/month (or whatever the math works out to be - I'm using $10 as an example).
About subscription price changes - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213252
> Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developers may do this no more than once per year.
Everyone who is subscribed would get an alert and no payment would go through.
However, the code is already there to work as a subscription app.
---
I would also draw attention to https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/141mjij/lets_tal...
> My last thing I wanted to address, and I might be burying the lede a bit here, is some of misleading, or downright inaccurate and untruthful claims that the admins have made in regards to these changes..
> > Apollo could reduce their cost by 3.5x if they were as efficient as these other 3P apps.
> So I have not dug into Apollo specifically as I didn't have an iOS rooted device handy. BUT, my guess as to the "increased calls" is due to them more frequently checking if a user has messages, and/or less caching of comment sections and more re-pulling them for the latest on navigation. Could Apollo not check for messages as frequently? Sure.. Reddit is Fun used to check for messages on any refresh it seems, and they sometime somewhat recently seem to have changed that and for game day threads which I frequently use it for, I often miss responses to my comments for a very long time because it seems to only do it now every so often.
> ...
> Edit: it was brought to my attention that Apollo does push notifications for messages even when you aren't using the app. This is almost certainly the main discrepancy between it and other apps API usage. And it could have been a back end change then related to the polling for those notifications that caused a reduction in API calls
Some of the architecture for that is described https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/9l3ema/apollo_13...
> For some quick math, Apollo has well over 100K active users. The server polls Reddit approximately every 6 seconds, so that's 10 requests per minute per user, or 600 requests per hour per user (assuming they only have one account and one device). At 100,000+ users, that's in the realm of 60 million requests per hour that my server would have to handle, not to mention parsing the results, coordinating tokens, etc. I really can't do that for nothing, so the plan was to offer push notifications with a small fee associated to cover these ongoing server costs.
> I understand the logic in not charging for basic system features such as camera usage, but push notifications require a server in order to function, and servers aren't free (in fact they get costly quick). I also offer a completely free system that does not use a server so those who don't want to have to pay can have their device function as the server and use local notifications (which are slightly delayed as it uses Background Fetch and using the device uses more battery), but remote notifications necessitate a server.
As it is designed, Apollo is very heavy on active polling for notifications.
This is described by Christian here - https://youtu.be/Ypwgu1BpaO0?t=1729 that it is polling reddit once every 10 seconds for each user of Apollo constantly.
