This entire thing started, as far as I recall, because the above was NOT being done. You're reading misinformation / misdirection.
It's also very predictable who will win the war: whomever has the root keys of the servers and web domains. Major reddits like r/funny are providing very limited value in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of the content is viral, not locally produced. So if a user is a r/funny subscriber and that goes dark, just present him with content from r/humor for a few months, they will get to see the same viral memes and 95% of the users will never notice anything went wrong.
Mods vastly overestimate their power here and underestimate the number of lurkers that form the backbone of Reddit viewership and are indifferent to this issue.
From the same AMA linked above:
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Free Data API
Effective July 1, 2023, the rate limits to use the Data API free of charge are:
100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication and 10 queries per minute if you are not using OAuth authentication.
Today, over 90% of apps fall into this category and can continue to access the Data API for free.
Premium Enterprise API / Third-party apps
Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app).
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So users are happy to pay, say, Netflix $15 a month, but are outraged when Reddit tries to charge heavy app users $1 a month?
Besides, they're not charging "heavy app users". They're charging "the apps". They are ensuring that the only entities that would even be able to afford their API costs are large businesses. As much money as Selig was making from Apollo, even he was unable to continue offering the app under these terms. Do you want increased capitalistic control of the Internet? Because this is one further step down that road, that I fear we may already be too far down.
Whoever said anything about whether it cost Reddit 24 cents to provide 1k API calls?
This subthread is about whether what Reddit is charging for API calls is "prohibitive", not about what it cost Reddit.
"Besides, they're not charging "heavy app users". They're charging "the apps"."
They're charging whoever uses Reddit's API keys, and I don't understand why third-party app users can't just use their own API keys and pay for their own API usage.
"As much money as Selig was making from Apollo, even he was unable to continue offering the app under these terms."
Why couldn't he just pass the costs down to the users of his app? Or just ask them to use their own API keys?
It's a loser fight for reddit. If you show your data to user, in any form, it can be scrapped. period.
Mods have generally been either neutral or positive towards reddit as an entity in the past, now... I suspect a lot are asking themselves if continuing to be a mod is worth the effort, at least on reddit itself, I can imagine a lot of them are looking for alternatives or just thinking about giving up altogether.
To be clear, Reddit has had $350+ million dollars in yearly revenue for a few years now, primarily from premium subscriptions and ad revenue (ads that are not, in fact, always blocked by 3rd-party clients -- ads show up in reddit Sync Pro all the time)
They absolutely could roll back everything and be profitable. They're "struggling to profit" because the CEO is literally burning all the money trying to chase an IPO, not because there was ever any fundamental problem with Reddit's cost structure.