[weinzierl]

I believe the motivation for providing the HN API was partly to discourage people from scraping the site and wasting their bandwidth. If the API goes away people will just go back to scraping.

Same for Reddit and that's why their point about all apps being freeloaders is disingenuous. If there is no API people will scrape which is inefficient and costs more bandwidth than API access and Reddit will have to implement countermeasures which is also not free.