Christian's (Apollo developer) math of $20 million a year in API cost is based off of Reddit's entire revenue for the year and not just breakeven costs. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
> Was the asking price really so unreasonable?
Most third-party apps have announced shutdown plans. they would not do this if the pricing was reasonable.
Maybe so, maybe not. The way it was handled was absolutely unreasonable.
Of the affected reader apps, the only ones with subscription models were Sync (on Android) and Apollo (on iOS). Basically everything else was one time purchases for some combination of an ad-free version and/or improved functionality.
For those apps not using subscriptions, they were basically told "you must now set up to handle subscriptions and detailed tracking of API usage" and given either ~75 days (from the 4/18 announcement) or ~30 days (from the pricing availability) to design, code, submit, get reviewed, resubmit, etc their apps, along with any business changes needed to handle substantial cash flow through the app, with only fixed upfront charges available to receive money and only postpaid usage-based charges for disbursing that money. Oh, and any app displaying third party ads (basically all of them) must stop doing so.
Personally I think that the third party apps weren't even considered in the decision making process because they're such a trivial percentage of API usage (credible reason to expect that all of them combined were ~5% or less of API usage, slightly more reliable numbers to believe that Apollo was < ~1.4% of API usage). Whether not factoring those in was incompetence or not is probably a matter of opinion. Or maybe there was actual malice and someone did want them all gone if someone on the official app side regarded them as competition to eliminate.
If the apps were considered and it was (quite fairly) decided that they needed to be a source of income, that's trivial to accomplish with reduced impact on the apps and more income flowing directly to Reddit. Boom! New policy! API usage requires a paid account and has enforced limits based on the account type! Introduce account tiers other than just Premium, change some features between them, collect all the money instead of filtering it through developers paying 30% to the app stores, and it's all very easy to implement for the developers.
From the calculations I've seen reddit's average revenue per user is much lower at around $2-3. However, the price on the API for Apollo in specific is of $30 per user per year.
