Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmytucson | Hacker News Reader

For the uninitiated, $2.52/month is what it would cost users to browse Reddit with Apollo under the current API pricing. RIF would be just $0.73/month[1].

For comparison, Reddit Premium is $5.99/month[2].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/premium

View on HN

Yeah, but I may be wrong, but isn't it quite hard for Reddit clients to handle this? They'd have to project how many API requests their users are going to make and if they underestimate it's potentially costing them millions. Also, it's difficult to modify app subscription prices constantly, especially for existing subscribers? They could offer in-app purchases of API requests, but that results in quit a bad UX.

If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it part of Reddit Premium? Reddit gets more premium subscribers and clients don't have to deal with all the complexities of how to handle API request prices.

It reeks of just wanting to destroy third-party clients in favor of their own (terrible) client.

Pretty easy to handle if you don't buy a monthly subscription but instead buy X API calls and can reload when you run out.

That doesn't sound like a great experience for users.

1. They don't directly know what actions are causing how many API calls, so it is unclear what they are buying.

2. It creates the incentive to use the service less to save money.

3. They aren't directly in control of what API calls the app makes, so there is some disconnect. (What if the developer decides to preload some info because it creates a better experience?)

Generally the user should be purchasing based on the value it offers them, not the cost to provide the service.

> If Reddit should charge for API access, why not make it part of Reddit Premium?

Wouldn't this be the worst of both worlds for the 3rd party app developers? In the current model, the developer of Apollo could charge $2.99/month and pay themselves $0.47/month/user. If we assume 80k paid users, that's $450k/year - not bad for a passion project!

If Reddit instead took it out of developers hands and made users of Apollo pay Reddit for access, that would seem mighty unfair to the developer of Apollo, wouldn't it?

It seems ideal to me where Reddit loses the ability to complain about usage by being able to control pricing for access and app developers get to recoup whatever they feel is necessary to maintain the app.

This may be myopic though.

I think that's low-balling it a lot.

If you start out at $5/month. $2.50 goes to reddit. $1.50 goes to apple. That leaves a buck a user, 960k earnt. The first tax calculator I found for novia scotia estimates $489,203 tax owed on that. So that's $470k/year. (Ignoring the difference between CDN and USD, because it makes relatively little difference to the tax due.)

I'd be curious how many users you could keep migrating from $5-once to $5/month.

Per the Apollo developer's post, a huge amount of the problem is existing subscriptions already sold for $10/year, which are now massive costs - and negative on net if there's even four months left on them. Not that having the price of your app suddenly quadruple from $10/year to $40/year because of API fees would be a small problem on its own!

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w... ("Why not just increase the price of Apollo" section)

Reimburse the yearly subscription their prorated amount and offer the new subscription amount, or even offer to apply the remainder as credit towards the new subscription. Seems pretty easy and obvious.

Easy and obvious if you're directly selling to users. Not so easy and obvious if the App Store is a middle-man.

I vaguely recall that Apple stepped in to help Twitter 3rd party clients sort out the refund situation when that platform pulled the same stunt.

A lot harder to do with ~30 days notice on insane pricing though.

He is doing a reimbursement anyway, I'm not sure what that would make harder?

I don't get why you can't just bring your own API key with Apollo. It seems pretty simple to have the user go through Oauth to set up an app and have his own quota.

You can, I've already made a modified version of Apollo and sideloaded it onto my phone with a tweak to set my own key instead of Apollo's

However there is a line on the developers page now that says all apps need to accept terms and sign up for a developers program, so I have my doubts it will continue to work either

How?

Apollo’s dev never released the source code to the app, only the server which sends out push notifications.

Probably jailbroken phone, but honestly I am equally clueless.

Presumsbly you could disassemble the app, replace the relevant keys, then sign it with your own developer app.

Probably possible to edit the API key resource without actually needing to see the source code.

> How?

And why? Before a few days ago, it wasn’t an issue at all.

I mean the reason should be plainly obvious if you’ve been following the last few days.

Sideloadly and a lot of messing about, it doesn't need to be jailbroken though.

While it's still here: https://old.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/145y787/tutorial...

That sub is private now

Please don’t do this, it’ll just make it even harder for actual developers and moderators to use Reddit’s API if people start abusing it.

Using your own API key is hardly abusing it. Officially (not that it means much these days) they've said they're keeping it free for individuals with 'standard' usage, which is what one sole user in an app would be.

The developer of Apollo has no interest in working with Reddit after this cluster fuck.

The API TOS has some nebulous verbiage about doing things that let a developer avoid the per app quotas, I'm sure reddit would apply it to any app that publicly did this

Would people maybe have been more okay with this, if the change was that you needed to pay for Reddit premium to be able to use API/other apps with your user? Then it was not be a bill forwarded to other apps, but a bill to each individual user using these apps?

They would probably have been able to reduce the price of Reddit premium at the same time.

This would not only be reasonable, it's a model used by other services offering APIs. Spotify which gates API access with a premium subscription comes to mind.

That's not interesting to Reddit however, because Reddit wants full control of user experience so they (theoretically) have more opportunities to monetize both users (including premium users) and their data, which probably looks better for a prospective IPO.

I wonder if this could also actually work against reddit's interests. I'm guessing that a lot of the power users / mods have the highest API load, by doing things like taking large mod actions. You'd effectively be charging them more for the privilege of working.

I'd say it's better than shutting mods and power users out of better apps entirely. They could also do things like give mods of subreddits past a certain subscriber/activity threshold free premium to help them mod better.

Large mod actions? Like nuking a thread? I sincerely hope the API includes bulk actions so it only takes one call to delete a list of comment ids

do you think 3rd party developers would be okay with this? in this scenario, the Reddit premium subscription fee would be a price floor and developers would have to charge a separate fee to use their app.

That would have been completely fine with me. But it's obvious at this point Reddit's goal was not to effectively monetize third-party apps. The goal was to crush them.

For me, removing NSFW (what will that even be defined as?) means 3rd party clients will have an incomplete experience.

I think that subreddits and posts already have NSFW tags.

Problem is that NSFW is used as a general content warning not just for porn. So if all NSFW content is blocked you lose a lot of non porn content too

Reddit also forces the NSFW tag onto content and subreddits for cigars and alcohol.

I don't see why the fuck anyone would buy reddit Premium. Enough with these subscriptions;

If it gave you the possibility to use other apps than the official? I think people would want to do that.

The business model being, we make a client so bad that you will willingly give us money to not use it.

Maybe if I could then bypass the ridiculous rules some mods put on their subreddits I would.

Imagine paying for Spotify, and then some ego tripping power nanny decides you aren’t allowed to listen to some of the music. It’s absurd.

The lex Friedman subreddit especially is like this. The number of people banned from that sub for simply disagreeing with Lex is ridiculous. Why on earth would I pay for something like that?

That assumes cooperation between reddit and third party devs.

Telling the devs about the change 2 months before applying it, low balling the price at first, smiting them at every corner, while not having any room for schedule adjustment... is just unreasonable for a change of that order of magnitude.

Reddit shows absolutely no willingness to make that relationship work, so it's kinda dead whichever way you look at it.

Great. I'd happily pay $2.52 per month. Now Apollo should release a version of the app with bring-your-own-API-keys, I'll sign up for developer access, and pay for my own API usage. Has no one thought of this?

You are missing the point that the developer needs a good working relationship with Reddit. He said very clearly that for him this is not about the money but about a passion project of his.

And Mark Cuban said he'd rather be an entrepeneur earning 50K a year than an employee earning 500K. Pretty easy to say when the developer of Apollo already made many millions off of it.

The 100 requests per minute fee oauth tier is how you would want to handle this right? The requests should be authenticated as if it was the current logged in user anyways.

that's per app, not per user.

Of course it would be doable but Reddit doesn't want this. They rather have complete control over the platform. They can't sell ads or metrics with third party apps.

> They can't sell ads or metrics with third party apps.

But why not? It's reddit's choice to not push ads into the API, they could certainly change that. They could also provide a telemetry sdk and mandate that all 3p apps use it.

There's a way to make this all work but given reddit is completely uninterested in maintaining the status quo they must have other directions they want to take the platform.

Usurious!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com