[adventured]

This isn't about API costs. It was changed so rapidly due to ChatGPT 4 and how it shocked the industry. They believe time is essential, in regards to pricing up the data (GPT has indicated to the Reddit company that it has massively undervalued its text content).

API pricing/use is the excuse to lock down their content asap. They see a goldmine under their own feet that others are extracting value from and so far they have not.

This is all about LLMs and perceived value related to that.

[Terretta]

This argument doesn't hold water. Licensing can charge commercial reuse differently, and technology can have 3rd party apps use OAuth, and reddit can enable that OAuth solely for users with Reddit Gold Plus, to get whatever they think they need per user.

It's users using the API, to contribute the content. If Reddit stopped to think it through, they'd realize content contributed by Apollo users is better for LLMs.

Finally, if it cost users to use the API, Reddit gets paid, apps compete on their own merits as they do today, and the pile miners pay for commercial harvesting of the content users paid reddit and the app builders to let them post.

It's hard to see why Reddit thinks their current approach is the cleverest.

[ryanmerket]

It's both. They are monetizing the data with LLMs AND they are still enabling 3P developers to monetize their users by charging a small monthly fee.

Let's say Apollo, Relay, or RIF charged $2/mo per user. Would that be enough to cover their expenses?

Looking at Reddit's now application programming interface pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month.Google/Apple App Stores take a 15% commission on subscriptions so a total per month per customer average cost would be $0.83 cents.

That means the devs would make $0.98 cents per month per user on a $2 subscription fee. (30 cents to Google, 73 cents to reddit, 98 cents left to pocket).

With this user base, even if only like 20,000 people subscribe the devs stand to make $20,000 every month in profit.

Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 50% conversion rate (meaning half of the users decide to subscribe) and charging $2.00 a month, he would make $750,000 / PER MONTH. That's with the new Reddit fees.