[gbear605]

Reddit doesn’t like to remember it, but it’s fundamentally a site where users provide content, and only a small fraction of users provide the most popular content (and do moderation). Those fraction tend to be the more advanced users that use things like third party apps or RES. So hurting those users is decreasing the amount of free work that the users give to Reddit, which means that either the site decreases in quality (less revenue) or Reddit needs to pay employees to do the same work (higher costs).

The cost of the third party apps themselves was trivial, and if they just wanted to recoup those costs they could have proposed a much more reasonable cost per user for third party apps.

It’s about control, not about profit.

[that_guy_iain]

> The cost of the third party apps themselves was trivial.

$10m isn't trivial unless your operating costs are in the billions.

[gbear605]

That’s what they wanted to charge - Reddit only makes $0.13/user/mo, so their cost must be less than that (or else Reddit has much bigger problems), so let’s say $0.05/user/mo. Apollo has 2 million users, so $1.2 million per year.

Moreover, at that cost, less than a dollar per user per year, Apollo could have instituted a $1/year subscription. But instead Reddit wanted over $100 per user per year, two orders of magnitude more than the cost.