Note that the Relay dev says that there's no way for him to offer a free version of Relay and make it financially viable. That means that user acquisition is going to tank, hard, because no one is going to be able to try the app before paying for it.

> Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 10% conversion rate and charging $2.00 a month

In other words, if he's willing to tell 1.35 million people to get fucked, he could turn his app that's widely beloved by many into an app that barely anyone knows about and new users are barely willing to consider trying.

These apps live and die by the same model: the paid users subsidize the free users. Who knows, maybe Christian could just tell those 1.35m people to get lost and it would be instantly profitable, but maybe that's not the app he wants to make. That seems entirely fair.

> To me it sounds like Christian just doesn't want to do the work.

Or, alternately, Christian feels betrayed by Reddit, because even though he's worked very closely with them for years, Reddit suddenly decided that yanking the carpet out from under third-party devs with thirty days' notice is the best way forward for them, and then the CEO turned around and slandered him all over the place, criticized Christian for having receipts, and then just continued to trash talk him everywhere.

Reddit has shown repeatedly through this ordeal that they don't actually want to work with people. Tons of other devs have reported that their e-mails are going unanswered. Christian asked about extensions or some other way to make things work and got no response. Reddit's goal here isn't to be profitable by charging 3p clients for API calls, it's to kill 3p clients and force them into their own terrible app.

Why would Christian want to jump through hoops to work with a company that's gone out of their way repeatedly to treat him like shit?

> Who is being dishonest?

Steve Huffman is a liar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246529

It's painful to post a comment that otherwise reads as low-quality flamebait. But I tried to defend his actions, and was dragged to the conclusion that he tried to damage Christian's reputation by making up a lie. He even acknowledged it was false during a phone conversation with Christian, then continued to tell the lie publicly.

It shattered my faith in him, and to a lesser degree in YC's "don't be evil" philosophy.

Christian isn't the only person with a dog in this fight, and none of what you just said at all negates Reddit's dishonesty throughout this entire situation.

> Looking at Reddit's new API pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month

The problem I think they will run into is that this 100 calls per day average is across all users, even those who don't use it that much.

Once you intersect that with the users who care enough and are willing to pay $2+ per month the average calls per user will blow out.

You pretty much have to be a heavy user in order to justify spending money on it.

And the Relay dev even points that out:

> An example is that a subscription could act as a filter where mostly high-rate users convert.

From what I understood, the problem is less the change itself but more the short notice. 30 days isn't much to redesign your app and monetization, especially if you had many users on year-long subscription plans.

Do try to remember, that they gave him 30 days to adopt this new pricing structure, which also includes trying to figure out how to reneg on the subscriptions he has already sold.