As a fitness app developer, I recently had a call with Reddit to discuss their announced pricing for third-party apps. Unfortunately, the news is not good – their proposed pricing is close to Twitter's, and Apollo would have to pay a staggering $20 million per year to keep running as-is.
I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs a whopping $12,000. That's far more than I ever could have imagined. With Apollo making 7 billion requests last month alone, that would put it at about $1.7 million per month or $20 million per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month – more than double what the current subscription costs.
I'm deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that it would be reasonable and based in reality, but their pricing seems anything but. For context, Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's proposed price is still a steep $12,000.
As I dug deeper, I found that Reddit's revenue has been on the rise. In less than two years ago, they crossed $100M in quarterly revenue for the first time ever. Assuming they've managed to do that every single quarter since then, and factoring in their Reddit Premium subscriptions, that's a staggering $550M in revenue per year. With 430 million monthly active users, that's just $1.40 per user per year – or $0.12 monthly.
For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly. With the proposed API pricing, the average user would cost $2.50 per month – a staggering 20x higher than their estimated revenue per user. The average subscription user currently uses 473 requests, which would cost $3.51 per month – a whopping 29x higher.
While Reddit has been communicative and civil throughout this process, I struggle to see how this pricing is reasonable or based in reality. As a developer, I don't have that kind of money or even know how to charge it to a credit card. This will require some serious thinking and reconsideration of our app's future.
I asked Reddit if they were flexible on this pricing or not, and unfortunately, they stated that it's their understanding that no, this is the pricing – and I'm free to post the details of the call if I wish.