[Paul-Craft]

You're right on the money. It's all that, and more. Basically, Reddit going to a paid API isn't the big deal. It's the fact that, say, Apollo can pay Imgur under $200/month for all the API calls they need, but Reddit is demanding $20M/year, or ~$1.7M/month [0]. That's what tradespeople call their "fuck off" rate, i.e. the rate they'd quote someone when they don't actually want to do a job, but also don't want to come out and say they don't want to do it.

The TL;DR on this whole situation is that Reddit quoted Apollo and other 3rd party apps their "fuck off" rate, and now Reddit is all like surprised Pikachu face that people who depend on those apps are, well... fucking off.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/08/popular-third-party-reddit...

Edit: $20M/year, not per month.

[shagie]

The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get.

https://api.imgur.com/#commercial takes us to https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing

The two plans there are $500/month for 7.5M requests and $10k/month for 150M requests.

[Paul-Craft]

> The under $200/month isn't a rate that anyone else can get.

Sounds to me like that rate might be Imgur saying "we welcome your business," rather than "fuck off."

[shagie]

Eight years ago, it was a "we welcome your business" with a "free heavy usage"

https://web.archive.org/web/20150320234625/https://api.imgur...

In 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20191002234012/https://rapidapi....

I suspect its an older rate that he got and was able to lock in for a while.

The current rate is about $0.07/1000.

If $0.24/1000 is a "fuck off" rate, then Imgur is less than an order of magnitude more friendly to new developers. Imgur's price 4 years ago was $4k for 150M requests.

Reddits pricing is mostly in line with similar social network API pricing (Twitter is still an outlier).

[tschwimmer]

It says right in the first paragraph of your link that it was going to cost $20m per year, not per month.

[Paul-Craft]

Brain fart. Fixed.