We know the costs and they’re ridiculous. Under the new pricing the average user of one third party app (Apollo) uses $2.50 worth of requests per month.
Doing that is going to kill a huge percentage of Apollo's user base. It's not a foregone conclusion that the app will die, but the chances of that happening are much much greater now than they were before. If you were the developer of Apollo I think you'd have every reason to be worried about that, and any opposition to this change would be justified.
We're talking about the fact that Reddit's API prices are going to be extremely high going forward. Your response was a dismissive "just charge 9 dollars". Obviously that is going to cause a lot of pain for all third party developers, which is the whole reason why everyone is complaining about this.
Again, the thing that is going to cause more pain is not charging anything.
My point is that this whole protest is framed as “We have no option and no way to exist unless Reddit gives in to our demands.” But the reality is that Reddit literally gave them an option.
It’s like the “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas” meme. Just make people pay. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
You forget that people using reddit also provide its content. Should users start charging reddit now as well? Reddit would be nothing without its users.