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Comment by coufu | Hacker News Reader

Even if the API price was reasonable, Reddit only gave 3rd party apps 30 days to prepare. You can’t come up with a decent pricing model, billing infrastructure, and incorporate the logic in your app in that amount of time. It’s just overall very hostile and unreasonable from Reddit leadership. The biggest apps are forced to shut down because if they stay up, the millions of dollars in bills are going to start flooding in.

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I agree with you that the timeline is tight.

Relay For Reddit has just announced their preliminary plan to offer a $2-3 a month paid version. They sound cautiously optimistic and are hoping for some flexibility on the tight timeline.

This is in stark contrast to a week ago when they were very doom and gloom.

The doom and gloom honestly is mostly driven by Reddit’s leadership being incompetent. If Reddit leadership reached out and worked things out privately and in a productive manner with 3rd party app developers to create a plan and agree on reasonable timelines, none of this drama would have surfaced at this magnitude. Would people still be pissed at the API charges forcing apps to charge subscription fees? Probably. But you wouldn’t have peoples’ favorite Reddit apps shutting down and creating a much bigger stir as we have today. And I think everyone is in agreement at some level that Reddit deserves some compensation for API usage. But again, this has all been handled very poorly by Reddit leadership.

> If Reddit leadership reached out and worked things out privately and in a productive manner with 3rd party app developers to create a plan and agree on reasonable timelines,

Well to be fair, that appears to be exactly what was happening until the dev of Apollo spat the dummy and turned it into a public mega drama before actually consulting with the users of his App on how much they'd be willing to pay.

This was Reddit's statement (proven to be false btw by audio recordings) before "the dev Apollo spat the dummy and turned it into a public mega drama":

> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245721 (there's probably a better source linked in there somewhere)

Soooo yeah the dev of Apollo should have just sat back and let Reddit's CEO control the narrative and tell lies to make itself look better?

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