Scharon Harding: Reddit Insists on Being “Fairly Paid” Amid API Price Protest Plans, Layoffs

As thousands of subreddits prepare to go dark in five days to protest Reddit's jacked-up API fees, Reddit claims it's only asking for what's fair. At the same time, the company is reportedly enacting layoffs and slowing hiring.

So obviously Reddit has no obligation to provide API access to outside developers, and certainly not for free, but this argument that they need to be “fairly paid” for these is patently ridiculous.

The developer (Christian Selig) of Apollo, the best Reddit app for iOS in my opinion, predicted that the new fees would cost him $20 million per year, far more money than he’s been earning from the app himself.

For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly. With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue.

Sure, Reddit has the right to some revenue from users who use third party apps if they want it, but asking for 20x what they earn from users who use the official Reddit apps and website is insane.

I love Reddit, but this move that basically kills third party apps sucks.