this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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All the 3pa's shut down business the moment the actual API prices were announced. This wasn't a protest move, the prices were simply 20 times higher than what they were promised and impossible to work into their business model. Reddit couldn't have overcharged and continued as normal - it was a deliberate move to kill off 3pa while pretending they are not. Reddit COULD have charged this API price to users directly via Reddit Premium, but failed to do so.
I think it also important to note that it wasn't just the pricing itself, which was indeed already heinous, but that the rate calculation changed. It used to be a rate per user per app (apikey+oauth) but they changed that to just the per app ... that then has a multiplicative effect on the costs and makes the "free tier" they were talking about especially pointless....
It would be easy for an app to start at free tier ... not have much growth through word of mouth but enough given the per app rates to push it over boundary points ... and then be due a significant and unavoidable invoice in a couple of months...
The rate is $0.24 per 1000 API calls. You are thinking about the "free tier". Before, all calls were free, and even if there were per-app/per-user limits buried in the docs they were not enforced. After the announcement there was some confusion about whether the new "free tier" limits are per-user or per-app, and turns out they are indeed 10 calls/minute per app! The free tier is for developer testing basically, it cannot be used for a mass market app. So the rate calculation hasn't changed, it was introduced to kill off free apps.