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You aren’t even mentioning the NSFW poison pill they added. Even if the pricing had been workable, this was never designed to do anything but kill external API access.

I definitely would have paid $6 a month to keep using Apollo.

>NSFW poison pill

Could you explain what you mean by this?

Something that has gotten lost amidst all the pricing talk is that Reddit said their API would also stop serving any content marked as NSFW, essentially making it useless for any third party app (general use or moderator use) even if they could come to an agreement on pricing.

The NSFW thing is extra annoying because there are a lot of subreddits that use the NSFW flag to mark entries as something else with styles applied to change the appearance.

Yeah, a huge % (I have no way of getting a real number but I’d bet everything on >25% of content on Reddit is marked as NSFW. It would make any client unusable.

The only way these API change make sense if the rumor that Steven Huffman is actually delusional enough to think that companies building LLMs will pay to use Reddit for training data is true.

I see. Thank you. That is quite important information, and it is a clear problem for moderators in my opinion.

The percentage of their party apps, vs people using the first party app, just based on Google play downloads is very miniscule. It is like saying using youtube-dl to consume YouTube is killing it. I mean we all love sponsor block and uBlock origin, do we have the same sympathy for YouTube?

The other thing about this that is so crazy is that services like Facebook Twitter and Instagram have all had heavily locked down APIs for a long time. Like, you couldn’t just start using their API you had to sign up and get approval. It moated social media management software like Hootsuite.

I know this because at one of my previous roles they wanted us to build a simple version of software like that and integrate it into their content management system but we couldn’t without also paying the full ticket for third party SaaS so it killed the project.

They could switch to something like that. Where compliance is checked and revoked. It would kill bots but not apps. But this was never designed to work, it’s how disingenuous it is that pisses me off.

I'm not sure how that would work for third party projects that are just front ends hosted on a github page, like reddit as outlook (https://one-loop.github.io/redlookit/). The requests are made by the users themselves there, we can't give them an api key.

We can do a "login with reddit" button approach, show them an iFrame so they can enter their user/password safely and grant us the rights to use their premium to make requests on our web page and such. The iFrame would need to be passed a nonce so we can ask reddit for updates on the user's login process and get a session token at the end, but even then although we've offloaded all the user data handling to reddit, at minima we can leak the session token to some server we own, and get to use their account's session to do whatever the permissions we asked for allow us to do including scrap reddit on their dime

We used to just be able to get the read-only stuff for free and we never needed to ask users to log in or to have an account... I wish they could just load ads in their API responses and kindly ask us to load them in the middle of the posts. We would. But I have a feeling that no advertiser would be OK having their product displayed on third party pages

Wouldn't this be mitigated by having a generous cap on the requests a Premium user could conceivably consume for typical usage? Per your leaked session scenario, Reddit could build some protections if the cap is exceeded. If credentials are compromised a user could request they be cycled and prudent decisions made at Reddit to provide them.

The user still gets shafted for that month because I used all of its data for myself

User could choose "per app" how much data it can use too

They already have something implemented in their API to have permissions granted in your account for third party apps. "Now for reddit" has permissions for reading my dms, upvoting, posting, ... basically anything you can do.

I don't really work in enterprise sales, but I always thought the idea was to lure em in with low prices. Going from free to $2.50 a user??

I also don't totally get why "by user" is how they wanted to charge. Wouldn't charging by request make more sense?

The API pricing was by request. $2.50/user/month was the estimate that the developer of Apollo made based on how many API requests each user of his app made.

They were charging by request. IIRC the $2.50 figure was arrived at by taking the total number of requests and dividing it by the total number of users.

ah I see. Too high a price then.

Yeah but the worst thing about it was the timescale. Most of the 3rd party apps would have choked down the cost if they had the time to transition. Reddit's true intention was made plain by giving them just 30 days to do so, while also removing NSFW content.

the actual price Apollo charged would likely have to be much higher. The average number of API calls for the users who are deep enough into reddit addiction to be willing to pay for it would be substantially higher without the casual user who views 10 pages a month to average it out.

The problem is casuals are not going to pay, only powerusers would pay and they're making hundreds of calls per day/thousands per month. Take that $2.50 number and 10-100x it, and then add in App Store payment processing costs.

Yeah I think they can set a general price, but for big hitters like Apollo they figure out what makes sense.

So yeah, I agree reddit is probably just trying to get rid of the app competition. I just can't believe any serious analysis led them to think this was the right pricing.

And Reddit already sells Reddit Gold, users could pay with it for the privilege to use the API on any third-party client. Everything so far points as Reddit deliberately killing third-party apps.

That’s the egregious thing. They wanted 20x their own revenues per user. And mind you that’s comparing revenues and costs. So it’s actually like 40-60 times more.

I think they are pricing in the future value of training an AI on reddit data, which *may* very well be a 20x investment in the long term.

> Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly

compute isn't free man. it probably costs millions of dollars a year just to pay the cloud providers to support those apps. i doubt that's a lie...

Well simple logic would say that if they get $.12 per user/month, the costs to serve each user (in terms of compute) is probably below $.12 or else they would be losing money, no?

$.12 is MAU, which visit sites few times a week.

Apollo devs claim his users make 250 reqs/d, which is very different users and there is likely huge gap in costs numbers between cohorts.

MAU as a figure cannot be a dollar amount, but instead only an integer no?

Silly.

Maybe you’re thinking of ARPU?

Even if the ARPU was an order of magnitude higher, it would still be half as much as Reddit is charging per user to 3PAs.

It’s not about compute cost, because compute cost is almost definitely below revenue and the fees being charged don’t seem to have any direct link to it anyway.

Compute cost per user must generally be below ARPU, right? So even if a 3PA user cost 5x in terms of compute, at most that would be $.75 if they’re making no profit. Significantly less than the $2.50 3PAs are being charged per user per month.

tldr: reddit is charging significantly more for API access than is reasonable to expect it costs them even in lost revenue, let alone raw compute

> So even if a 3PA user cost 5x in terms of compute

in case of apollo my belief is that it will be much more than 5x

it is also not just about pure compute, but also paying salaries.

> more than 5x

doubt. the backend was open sourced to dispel this rumor.

> salaries

Salaries are a fixed cost, so not super relevant to API costs given what we already know. ARPU is ARPU. The amortized cost of a user to reddit is below or around ARPU (including R&D), unless they’re making the decision to still leave profit on the table in exchange for growth. However, given recent moves I doubt that.

> doubt. the backend was open sourced to dispel this rumor.

how its even relevant? Now that backend with unproven track record and unknown quality needs to handle petabytes of reddit data under significant load and with low latency.

you can just do the math I proposed to do above: mau visits site few times a month, apollo users generate 250 reqs every day, how we can come to just 5x difference here?

> Salaries are a fixed cost

its fixed but significant and adds to final number.

> mau visits site few times a month

To you, does MAU stand for monthly active user (singular noun?)

> 250 reqs every day

Do you know the difference between a request to the API and a site visit?

> To you, does MAU stand for monthly active user (singular noun?)

correct.

> Do you know the difference between a request to the API and a site visit?

sure, you can incorporate your view on difference into you calculations of how you could arrive to 5x estimation.

> sure, you can incorporate your view on difference into you calculations of how you could arrive to 5x estimation.

??

Regardless, Reddit wouldn’t prioritize a singular monthly active user (MAU) mentioned in this context. It’s more valuable for Reddit to have users who consistently visit, whether through Apollo or the official Reddit app. As long as advertising is effective and API pricing is appropriate, Reddit can generate profit.

From this perspective, what matters is the ratio of calls per view between different clients, not the type of user. It’s absurd to compare an inactive user on the official app with an active user on a third-party app. The issue at hand is unrelated to the cost of serving views or the potential revenue loss associated with those views.

In my opinion, the motivation behind these actions is 70% in response to low-effort low-value moderators (LLMs) and 30% due to the convenient timing to remove third-party apps (3PAs).

I asked you several times to show your math how you came to 5x. Please show if you really interested in meaningful discussion.

> So even if a 3PA user cost 5x in terms of compute ...

> I asked you several times to show your math how you came to 5x. Please show if you really interested in meaningful discussion.

Consider this: The Apollo app could generate significantly more requests (5x, 10x, 20x, ... ?) to serve the exact same content and still not justify the new pricing it is being charged. In other words, the app would have to be incredibly inefficient, which doesn't align with Occam's razor. It seems more plausible that Reddit has made allegations that are only loosely based on fact, rather than Apollo being so inefficient despite its high-quality reputation.

There is no specific mathematical calculation to present. I did not conduct benchmarks for you, if that's what you expected.

Your argument revolves around comparing an active 3PA user with an inactive Reddit user, which is fundamentally flawed and easily refutable. I focused on that aspect because it is not a valid comparison.

> The Apollo app could generate significantly more requests (5x, 10x, 20x, ... ?) to serve the exact same content and still not justify the new pricing it is being charged.

my hypothesis is that apollo users generate more requests because they are some power users like mods, or more engaged and active users compared to reddit MAU, so they bothered researching and installing 3p app.

> Your argument revolves around comparing an active 3PA user with an inactive Reddit user, which is fundamentally flawed and easily refutable.

no, it is people who brought that $0.15 per MAU number do such comparison.

I would compare daily active users, which are about 12x times less for reddit, and you would come to number close to $2/user.

> my hypothesis is that apollo users generate more requests because they are some power users like mods, or more engaged and active users compared to reddit MAU, so they bothered researching and installing 3p app.

Yes. It’s still silly to compare power users and non power users though in this context as I’ve pointed out.

I’m very confused about what you are attempting to say in the latter half of your reply.

However, to sum up, I wanted to reference this post from the apollo dev that came out today [0]. People who come to this thread in the future might benefit from the more detailed breakdowns and explanations with references provided there.

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_t...

> Yes. It’s still silly to compare power users and non power users though in this context as I’ve pointed out.

sure, and that's people like you who constantly bring those $0.12 of reddit revenue per user doing such silly comparison.

i thought they _were_ losing money?

Reddit likely could’ve taken profit in recent years, but was instead focused on growth. Reddit doubled its headcount in 2021.

There’s no reason to think that compute is a constraining cost for reddit imo. They produce what is at this point legacy tech.