this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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The situation is now as it is, and we can no longer change it. Reddit has often made itself unpopular in the past with wrong decisions in the community. But this time I think they have gone too far and won't get away with this so easily. Maybe they are going to kill their own product very soon.
We all fully understand that this is a business that needs to make a profit, so they can't make their APIs totally free for everyone. Running such a service costs a lot of money indeed.
But doing so at the expense of the third-party apps that made Reddit the popular platform it is today for end users in the first place is not a smart move at all. Hands down, Reddit has not been able to bring its platform up to modern technical standards for years. Not to mention that they are not able to provide a decent web and mobile UI to their users. This is exactly the job that third-party apps are currently taking over.
What I would have done instead of Reddit is not to wipe out the very apps that keep my platform alive and make it an enjoyable experience for my end-users - but instead support those apps as much as I could. Why not provide those apps completely free API access and let the Reddit users bring their own API-access keys into those apps? Make a free Reddit tier plan which allows users to browse Reddit for free. As soon as a Reddit user wants to write posts or comments, let them pay a little monthly fee (lets say $2). Not only would that solve the problem for Reddit how to make more money without making small app developers pay, it would also significantly improve the quality of the content on the platform since it would lock out all the trolls and spammers from posting their shitty stuff.
I feel like making users pay a subscription would also kill Reddit.
I'm one of those people that would have paid a subscription if Reddit Premium actually gave me any cool features.
Why do you think that? Apollo users are already paying subscription fees to the app developer right now (me included). And as long as you are just a lurker, access could still be free. Sure not everyone is willing to pay $2, but if just 1/3 of all current Reddit users would do, that’s a ton of money - much more than they would ever get from the app developers paying for API requests.
I would have never paid a subscription fee for Reddit OR a Reddit app. I'm all for paying for software but these kinds of apps either have a one-time-payment or they'll never see a dime from me.
The problem with that is that it’s not a sustainable business model for the app developers because of the way that mobile apps work.
Traditionally, consumer apps released a version that you bought and that was it. Next year there’d be a new version and you’d buy it if it offered features you wanted and not otherwise. The developer has the motivation to keep coming up with new features to get the repeat purchase.
Mobile apps don’t have the ability to do that. There’s one version which is the latest version so you buy it once and get free updates for life. The only regular income that the developer can get with this model is from new buyers. There’s only so many buyers in the market for a Reddit app (for any app really) so it’s difficult to make a pay cheque with that model.
The solution is either to provide the app for free and to show ads or move to a subscription model for extra features.
I didn't realise Apollo users paid a subscription. I paid for Relay on android years ago. Must be an Apple thing I guess.
In that case, I agree some users would move over to paying Reddit directly. But I still don't think that would be enough.
Yes, while Apollo is generally a free app, it has a premium subscription for users, providing advanced features like push notifications and other stuff. Since the app developers have to run their own backend to make those features work, users have to pay a small fee (what is totally OK for me since it is such a great app and I liked to support the developer this way).
You are right that this just solves a small part of the problem. If the numbers I have seen are correct, the API calls from all those mobile apps just make up a small number from the overall. A huge issue seem to be all those search engines and AI dudes feeding their stuff with data from Reddit (🫣 why would someone want to do this...). For those, I think it is still fair to let them pay per API request. So they could just give regular users a large amount of API request and force commercial users who want to scrape content with their bots to have an enterprise business plan and pay per API usage.
Apollo users that believe in the project would probably be way more willing to pay a small indie dev compared to a burgeoning wannabe megacorp. Christian said refunding half of the year for his yearly subs would cost him a quarter mil (half of the 500k he made off those subs this year) which is nuts but like the man made a good app. I paid for the one time premium because I used it so much and I was impressed.