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Comment by IMTDb | Hacker News Reader

> I haven't seen any notable number of people arguing that the API should remain free no matter what

I haven't seen any notable number of people giving a counter offer to the proposal of Reddit. People "agree that it should not be free", but are unable to give any number of what they think it should cost. All we know is that the proposal, which averages at around $2.50 / user / month is "outrageous", bearing in mind that this allows to browse Reddit fully ad-free, denying them of that revenue stream.

I really don't know how people expect Reddit to make money; they apparently don't think the service is worth $2.50 / month, but they seem to forget that Facebook sells their data for 20x that amount.

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The major argument I've seen for that cost being "outrageous" is that if it needs to cost $2.50/month, there should have been a greater-than-30-days warning so that the existing clients could shift business models to support it (shut down free access, migrate existing subscribers to plans that cover the cost, etc). It's the failure to provide a grace period that gives the impression they're just trying to shut down the third-party clients.

For reference here, the Apollo dev posted numbers indicating that they'd expect a $20 million / year API access bill, and separately mentioned that if everyone with a current annual subscription gets their balance refunded now they're shutting down it'll cost them ~$250,000. (It's hard to guess how much of their traffic comes from free users, of course, so they'd presumably need to raise prices less than the 40x this implies...)

Christian Selig's post covers this in detail and includes references to other app developers with similar concerns.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

I think some important takeaways are: the proposed pricing monetizes the users much higher than Reddit can general monetize them today. And the 30 day window apparently precludes any kind of orderly transition for the app developers who have been monetizing their apps on a yearly schedule.

> the proposed pricing monetizes the users much higher than Reddit can general monetize them today

That's the whole point ! All users of Apollo bring in precisely $0 / month. And reddit will never ever be able to monetise them at all unless they start charging for the API. That's the core of the issue; with no many free riders, the average revenue / user is doomed to stay close to 0.

The question is not "how much revenue / user does reddit make on average" since all Apollo users are dragging the average close to 0 no matter what Reddit does. The question is "how much revenue / user does reddit make on average excluding bots and non ad-watching user". The number then skyrockets and $2.50 / month seems like the answer.

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