There are lots of mistakes Reddit made that shows they aren’t trying.
They could have given more advance notice for the API price increase. This would give apps more time to update their code to use fewer API calls. Many apps are subscription-based, so it would give them more time to update their subscription price.
The price should have been based on Reddit’s actual costs, actual revenue, and actual profits. I.e., if it costs Reddit $0.10 per user per year and their revenue per user is $0.15 per user per year from ads, then the API price should have been $0.15-$0.25 per user per year. The actual pricing shows they made it artificially high to kill the 3rd party apps. (I don’t know what the actual numbers are.)
Even if Reddit really did want to charge $5 per month for API users, the right way to do it is to start from a lower price and increase it 20%-50% per year until they get to their target price.
If a user had Reddit premium, they should have been given extra API call tokens they can give to their 3rd party app.
There are lots of mistakes Reddit made that shows they aren’t trying.
They could have given more advance notice for the API price increase. This would give apps more time to update their code to use fewer API calls. Many apps are subscription-based, so it would give them more time to update their subscription price.
The price should have been based on Reddit’s actual costs, actual revenue, and actual profits. I.e., if it costs Reddit $0.10 per user per year and their revenue per user is $0.15 per user per year from ads, then the API price should have been $0.15-$0.25 per user per year. The actual pricing shows they made it artificially high to kill the 3rd party apps. (I don’t know what the actual numbers are.)
Even if Reddit really did want to charge $5 per month for API users, the right way to do it is to start from a lower price and increase it 20%-50% per year until they get to their target price.
If a user had Reddit premium, they should have been given extra API call tokens they can give to their 3rd party app.
I believe I read $0.24 per
5001000 API calls somewhere, which is insanely high.$12 per 50,000,000 calls is the figure Selig mentions.
Oops, I left out the letter ‘k’.