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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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