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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

Why is this rate absurd?

From the article, it says Reddit would charge Apollo $2.50 per user per month. Right now, ad-free YouTube costs $12 a month, ad-free Twitch costs $12 a month. I can't buy ad-free Twitter at any price. Is it really not worth $2.50 a month to have ad-free Reddit?

Personally, I like Apollo, and I would be willing to pay to keep an ad-free Reddit experience. I'm disappointed that the two sides didn't manage to work this out.

I feel like Reddit is getting attacked despite being the company that is trying the hardest to make this work. The standard approach is just to ban apps that compete with the in-house app. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, all of those services just completely forbid things like Apollo. All these complaints are going to encourage companies to simply ban alternate apps rather than trying to price an API in the future.

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You're comparing video streaming services (one of them a live streaming service) that have far more cost per user, to something that has far more minimal costs. You're also comparing individual account cost per user that includes much more than just API access.

Where is your evidence or even subjective knowledge about Reddit being the company that's trying the hardest to make this work?

Also, to answer your initial question, regardless of anything else in your comment, the rate is absurd because it clearly falls under bait and switch. Build up your userbase, including offering your content from an API until you're basically the monopoly in your market and then start charging per month, per user, for API access. It's not like individual users are paying for their API access and feeding that API key to other apps to use. It's clearly meant to crush 3rd party apps, not facilitate Reddit making money through 3rd party apps. They can make far more money through their own massively ad infested app without providing any of the features that make other apps attractive, if they just crush 3rd party apps. In which case, why both charging for the API. As others have suggested, why not just shut it down or limit it? Simply because they want to appear as if they're not shutting out the world, while still doing exactly that.

The new rate would require Apollo to monetize its entire userbase which includes a large number of free users and life-time-membership users in addition to increasing rates for existing subscribers.

Further switching to the reddit-model would require turning their back on free users with disabilities.

So while it is practical to shell out many of the principals behind the Apollo project in order to meet Reddit's IPO stat-padding requirements, the developer has chosen to shut down.

I mean, if by “trying the hardest” you mean “saying they’re trying the hardest while not outright banning apps” then sure, I guess they tried the hardest.

They’ve made it pretty clear they’re not really trying to keep apps. Several developers in the Huffman interview pointed out that they’ve reached out for months if not years to absolute silence in return.

YouTube and Twitch are different beast all together due to their costs. They also do revenue sharing for the content users provide, something reddit is not doing.

> I feel like Reddit is getting attacked despite being the company that is trying the hardest to make this work.

If they are genuinely trying to make this work, why did they only give 30 days notice for third party devs to figure this out? Seems to me their goal was to kill third party apps and that they have already succeeded.

> The standard approach is just to ban apps that compete with the in-house app.

Sure, but something being the norm doesn’t mean people like it. With reddit being how it was for so long and having a genuinely terrible default app, it’s no wonder they are getting flamed as much as they are. The way they have handled this on the PR side doesn’t help.

I think if reddit wanted this to actually work, the smart move would have been to allow users to pay for API access and use their token through the app of their choice. This would be more viable than the per-app basis they went with, which puts all the third party devs in an incredibly tough spot and effectively forced them all to shut down.

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