No, they're charging exorbitant rates for API access lol. I honestly can't understand how people can look at $2.50 / month per user for a few JSON responses and think "wow now that's reasonable."

If their infrastructure is that bad that it costs even on the order of a dollar per month per user to serve API requests, then I'd be horrified to imagine how much it costs them to send entire HTML pages to the millions of people that use desktop exclusively.

He did not say that, he said

> Apollo's price would be approximately $2.50 per month per user

which is an estimate of how much they'd have to pay Reddit for each user in API costs alone. But it doesn't take into account cost of Apollo's own servers and infrastructure, Apple's fees, or the fact that there are people with paid for yearly subscriptions that'd have to be served:

> Even if I added 12,000 new subscribers at $5/month (an enormous feat given the short notice), after Apple's fees that would just be enough to break even. > > Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days. That's a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it's just not economically feasible.

(quoted from https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...)

All in all it's a much different thing if Reddit said they want to charge the users $2.5/mo for API access, given them their own key and let use whatever 3rd party app they want. They want to charge the 3rd party apps directly, which is a whole different story that can't really be summed up as to "$2.5 is not that high if people really want to use third party apps"