It implies that the bare costs of serving the API requests are the issue (subsidising means, it costs us more to provide you something than you pay us for it).

It implies that the bare costs of serving the API requests are the issue (subsidising means, it costs us more to provide you something than you pay us for it). Reddit wants to charge $0.24/1k API calls. That doesn't seem to be reasonable. To calibrate this, consider what is charged for API access by say, AWS for S3 API calls: $0.005/1k API calls. So they are two orders of magnitude higher than AWS. Obviously it's hard to compete on infrastructure cost with an actual cloud provider, but I still think two orders of magnitude should be enough that an entity the size of Reddit can offer a much more reasonable price than that. They could also optimise their API layer to better match the needs of 3rd party apps if the pure number of calls is the issue.