It sorta poisons the discussion, though. Mobile phone and desktop APIs are marginal-cost to call if you own the hardware it runs on. Social media APIs have an inherent cost associated with maintaining the endpoints and returning values quickly. For sites like Twitter and Reddit, that price is non-negligible enough that it has to be recouped somehow.

Overall it just feels like more pearls before swine. I don't mind it starting the discussion, but it feels like a poor way of framing it, to the point that it dooms everything to fail on the basis that "it costs too much".