The thing is that they should be able to introduce their API pricing without triggering the events of the past days. I'm not even remotely an expert, but the pricing seems too aggressive and seems to contradict was communicated earlier (again based on the apollo transcripts).
On the other hand they are supposed to be experts, or they should at least ask one, given the millions of users, thousands of mods, etc involved.
Per Christian (the Apollo app dev): "(...) Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls." [1]
All assuming he is not lying (which I have no reason to believe, contrary to the reddit reps). Two orders of magnitude over Imgur pricing sounds a bit greedy, unless Imgur is also at the verge of collapse, which I'm not aware of.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
He's got a sweetheart deal.
https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing
There is no $166 plan. The least expensive $500/month plan is "only" 7.5M requests per month.
50M requests under the ultra plan (7.5M requests and then $0.001 for each one after) would cost $43k/month - and it would be more sensible to go to the "mega" plan then which is $10k/month for 150M API calls.