If Reddit is asking 12000$ for 50M requests, then a regular Reddit user (344 reqs/day) would be paying around 2,5$/month, which seems more reasonable than putting the burden on the 3rd party developer.
In any case, Reddit has no interest in pivoting their business model away from ads to paid subscriptions. This is a dog and pony show they're holding prior to "making the difficult decision" to eliminate 3rd party competitors.
Which is less than I pay for premium. If more people would just, I dunno, pay for services they use regularly, Reddit wouldn't have a problem.
To give just the most recent example: They PMd everyone in Germany about their great new subreddits (Big US subs with the names translated to German), filled with bots posting successful posts and comments from those big subs, auto-translated.
Yeah, that’s a quirky anecdote when Reddit started 17 years ago, it’s a lot less quirky when you do it now.
All the moderators are unpaid 'workers'. And their quality can be abhorrent to the extreme.
Basically reddit is the perfect example of getting people to contribute content and work for free. And when people are run off, so does your content and your moderators.
I moderate several subs, some of them rather sizable. I do it because I want a quality community, not because I want a payday, I probably average 8-10 hours a week moderating which often overlaps with my active participation in the communities. No one is forcing me to do it, I do it because I value the communities.
I similarly give many hours a week to my church, I don't roll up "yo, pay me!" because that's not the point. I show up and teach a class, my wife shows up and leads young women's, we both go and clean the building, when someone needs help and we're free we're there, it's something we care about not a means of earning income. Same goes for moderating Reddit - anyone that thinks it should be a paid gig has no business moderating.
You gave anecdotes about volunteering at non-profit, like your church. I don't attend church myself, but doing non-profit things to help a community is definitely laudable. And I think the more we all do activities like that, we'd have a better community and eventually a better country.
But there is definitely a difference between non-profit volunteering labor (where the sum of your labor is enjoyed by everyone attending), and being a subreddit moderator.
Reddit is a for-profit company, where they derive their profit from 2 different areas: people contributing their personal content, and people moderating for free the areas of a topic. And real paid moderators get real money on other platforms. Why doesn't reddit? Cause they were able to get users to "make-believe" that their subreddit was theirs.
You're there to make the admins profit. And when your subreddit no longer does that, "ownership" is transferred rather quickly. Or your mod accounts will be mass-reported and banned. Or a whole host of other issues. Earlier on, seeing banned subreddits wasn't a thing. Now, I can stumble in from a Google search and hit a banned sub. And we're talking technical subreddits, not porn or violence.
And just how long have bigger subreddits been requesting better automod tooling, and never materializes?
Reddit sucks the oxygen out of the "community" to feed its profit, and provides scraps to make people think they're getting a good deal.
We're now seeing the furtherance of this with this laughable API bill. And it's not targeted at Apollo, btw. Head over to Youtube shorts or Tiktok and witness just how many "bot reads a reddit post with top 2 comments, with unrelated minecraft video". "Scrape-add video-upload" is the big thing I would bet that reddit's trying to stop without paying a pound of flesh.
But still, I'd start looking for other platforms to move your userbase to. Just casually set up offsite operations along with your subreddit, and steer users to all non-reddit areas. (Discord, Mastodon, Twitter, even Facebook) Cause when Reddit finally goes Digg v4, it's going to be crazy.
The shitty thing here is iOS/Android devs that do find a way to pass through to cost might price themselves out of the 15% tier even when 90%+ of the money they collect (after the Apple/Google tax) is going to just be handed to Reddit. That might screw up the economics of any other IAP they have (to unlock features or what not).
They can raise prices to account for the extra 15% loss but still sucks. Apollo alone would hit Apple/Google's 15% rate limit in less than a month and even if it lost 19/20th of it's users it'd still hit it for the year given his estimates.
If companies can be profitable with just subscriptions, they wouldn't need to sell ads. And yet the NYT, FT and WSJ blanket their subscribers with just as many ads as they do for non-subs.