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What makes me really sad was there was a way around this. Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly , Reddits monthly revenue per user is $

What makes me really sad was there was a way around this. Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly , Reddits monthly revenue per user is $0.12 at best. They were demanding $2.50 per user per month from third party apps. A simpler solution - “users who want to use third party apps need to pay Reddit $6/month directly by subscribing to Reddit premium”. That would have raised way more revenue! And people would have understood as well. They can pay for the premium experience of using a third party client or they can use the free official client. Win Win! Except, this isn’t about the cost of running the API for private users (the aforementioned lie). Reddit the company feels aggrieved that they aren’t being paid by OpenAI and others when they’re training models on some of the most high quality, up to date, moderated, on topic training data generated by Reddit users. Which is fair enough, that’s worth waaay more than $6/month. But surely that could be resolved through rate limits and a licensing contract signed by the LLM companies.

deleted 3y ago
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sebstefan 3y ago
I'm not sure how that would work for third party projects that are just front ends hosted on a github page, like reddit as outlook (https://one-loop.github.io/redlookit/ https://one-loop.github.io/redlookit/). The requests are made by the users themselves there, we can't give them an api key. We can do a "login with reddit" button approach, show them an iFrame so they can enter their user/password safely and grant us the rights to use their premium to make requests on our web page and such. The iFrame would need to be passed a nonce so we can ask reddit for updates on the user's login process and get a session token at the end, but even then although we've offloaded all the user data handling to reddit, at minima we can leak the session token to some server we own, and get to use their account's session to do whatever the permissions we asked for allow us to do including scrap reddit on their dime We used to just be able to get the read-only stuff for free and we never needed to ask users to log in or to have an account... I wish they could just load ads in their API responses and kindly ask us to load them in the middle of the posts. We would. But I have a feeling that no advertiser would be OK having their product displayed on third party pages
- gausswho 3y ago
  Wouldn't this be mitigated by having a generous cap on the requests a Premium user could conceivably consume for typical usage? Per your leaked session scenario, Reddit could build some protections if the cap is exceeded. If credentials are compromised a user could request they be cycled and prudent decisions made at Reddit to provide them.
  - sebstefan 3y ago
    The user still gets shafted for that month because I used all of its data for myself User could choose "per app" how much data it can use too They already have something implemented in their API to have permissions granted in your account for third party apps. "Now for reddit" has permissions for reading my dms, upvoting, posting, ... basically anything you can do.
az226 3y ago
That’s the egregious thing. They wanted 20x their own revenues per user. And mind you that’s comparing revenues and costs. So it’s actually like 40-60 times more.
- cesarvarela 3y ago
  I think they are pricing in the future value of training an AI on reddit data, which *may* very well be a 20x investment in the long term.
wombat-man 3y ago
I don't really work in enterprise sales, but I always thought the idea was to lure em in with low prices. Going from free to $2.50 a user?? I also don't totally get why "by user" is how they wanted to charge. Wouldn't charging by request make more sense?
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  The API pricing was by request. $2.50/user/month was the estimate that the developer of Apollo made based on how many API requests each user of his app made.
- Jochim 3y ago
  They were charging by request. IIRC the $2.50 figure was arrived at by taking the total number of requests and dividing it by the total number of users.
  - wombat-man 3y ago
    ah I see. Too high a price then.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      Yeah but the worst thing about it was the timescale. Most of the 3rd party apps would have choked down the cost if they had the time to transition. Reddit's true intention was made plain by giving them just 30 days to do so, while also removing NSFW content.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      the actual price Apollo charged would likely have to be much higher. The average number of API calls for the users who are deep enough into reddit addiction to be willing to pay for it would be substantially higher without the casual user who views 10 pages a month to average it out. The problem is casuals are not going to pay, only powerusers would pay and they're making hundreds of calls per day/thousands per month. Take that $2.50 number and 10-100x it, and then add in App Store payment processing costs.
dimmke 3y ago
You aren’t even mentioning the NSFW poison pill they added. Even if the pricing had been workable, this was never designed to do anything but kill external API access. I definitely would have paid $6 a month to keep using Apollo.
- anaganisk 3y ago
  The percentage of their party apps, vs people using the first party app, just based on Google play downloads is very miniscule. It is like saying using youtube-dl to consume YouTube is killing it. I mean we all love sponsor block and uBlock origin, do we have the same sympathy for YouTube?
  - dimmke 3y ago
    The other thing about this that is so crazy is that services like Facebook Twitter and Instagram have all had heavily locked down APIs for a long time. Like, you couldn’t just start using their API you had to sign up and get approval. It moated social media management software like Hootsuite. I know this because at one of my previous roles they wanted us to build a simple version of software like that and integrate it into their content management system but we couldn’t without also paying the full ticket for third party SaaS so it killed the project. They could switch to something like that. Where compliance is checked and revoked. It would kill bots but not apps. But this was never designed to work, it’s how disingenuous it is that pisses me off.
- Dah00n 3y ago
  >NSFW poison pill Could you explain what you mean by this?
  - dimmke 3y ago
    Something that has gotten lost amidst all the pricing talk is that Reddit said their API would also stop serving any content marked as NSFW, essentially making it useless for any third party app (general use or moderator use) even if they could come to an agreement on pricing.
efficax 3y ago
> Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly compute isn't free man. it probably costs millions of dollars a year just to pay the cloud providers to support those apps. i doubt that's a lie...
- appletrotter 3y ago
  Well simple logic would say that if they get $.12 per user/month, the costs to serve each user (in terms of compute) is probably below $.12 or else they would be losing money, no?
  - alickz 3y ago
    i thought they _were_ losing money?
    - appletrotter 3y ago
      Reddit likely could’ve taken profit in recent years, but was instead focused on growth. Reddit doubled its headcount in 2021. There’s no reason to think that compute is a constraining cost for reddit imo. They produce what is at this point legacy tech.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    $.12 is MAU, which visit sites few times a week. Apollo devs claim his users make 250 reqs/d, which is very different users and there is likely huge gap in costs numbers between cohorts.
    - appletrotter 3y ago
      MAU as a figure cannot be a dollar amount, but instead only an integer no? Silly. Maybe you’re thinking of ARPU? Even if the ARPU was an order of magnitude higher, it would still be half as much as Reddit is charging per user to 3PAs. It’s not about compute cost, because compute cost is almost definitely below revenue and the fees being charged don’t seem to have any direct link to it anyway. Compute cost per user must generally be below ARPU, right? So even if a 3PA user cost 5x in terms of compute, at most that would be $.75 if they’re making no profit. Significantly less than the $2.50 3PAs are being charged per user per month. tldr: reddit is charging significantly more for API access than is reasonable to expect it costs them even in lost revenue, let alone raw compute

deleted 3y ago

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sebstefan 3y ago

I'm not sure how that would work for third party projects that are just front ends hosted on a github page, like reddit as outlook (https://one-loop.github.io/redlookit/ https://one-loop.github.io/redlookit/). The requests are made by the users themselves there, we can't give them an api key. We can do a "login with reddit" button approach, show them an iFrame so they can enter their user/password safely and grant us the rights to use their premium to make requests on our web page and such. The iFrame would need to be passed a nonce so we can ask reddit for updates on the user's login process and get a session token at the end, but even then although we've offloaded all the user data handling to reddit, at minima we can leak the session token to some server we own, and get to use their account's session to do whatever the permissions we asked for allow us to do including scrap reddit on their dime We used to just be able to get the read-only stuff for free and we never needed to ask users to log in or to have an account... I wish they could just load ads in their API responses and kindly ask us to load them in the middle of the posts. We would. But I have a feeling that no advertiser would be OK having their product displayed on third party pages

gausswho 3y ago
Wouldn't this be mitigated by having a generous cap on the requests a Premium user could conceivably consume for typical usage? Per your leaked session scenario, Reddit could build some protections if the cap is exceeded. If credentials are compromised a user could request they be cycled and prudent decisions made at Reddit to provide them.
- sebstefan 3y ago
  The user still gets shafted for that month because I used all of its data for myself User could choose "per app" how much data it can use too They already have something implemented in their API to have permissions granted in your account for third party apps. "Now for reddit" has permissions for reading my dms, upvoting, posting, ... basically anything you can do.

az226 3y ago

That’s the egregious thing. They wanted 20x their own revenues per user. And mind you that’s comparing revenues and costs. So it’s actually like 40-60 times more.

cesarvarela 3y ago
I think they are pricing in the future value of training an AI on reddit data, which *may* very well be a 20x investment in the long term.

wombat-man 3y ago

I don't really work in enterprise sales, but I always thought the idea was to lure em in with low prices. Going from free to $2.50 a user?? I also don't totally get why "by user" is how they wanted to charge. Wouldn't charging by request make more sense?

AlexandrB 3y ago
The API pricing was by request. $2.50/user/month was the estimate that the developer of Apollo made based on how many API requests each user of his app made.
Jochim 3y ago
They were charging by request. IIRC the $2.50 figure was arrived at by taking the total number of requests and dividing it by the total number of users.
- wombat-man 3y ago
  ah I see. Too high a price then.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    Yeah but the worst thing about it was the timescale. Most of the 3rd party apps would have choked down the cost if they had the time to transition. Reddit's true intention was made plain by giving them just 30 days to do so, while also removing NSFW content.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    the actual price Apollo charged would likely have to be much higher. The average number of API calls for the users who are deep enough into reddit addiction to be willing to pay for it would be substantially higher without the casual user who views 10 pages a month to average it out. The problem is casuals are not going to pay, only powerusers would pay and they're making hundreds of calls per day/thousands per month. Take that $2.50 number and 10-100x it, and then add in App Store payment processing costs.

dimmke 3y ago

You aren’t even mentioning the NSFW poison pill they added. Even if the pricing had been workable, this was never designed to do anything but kill external API access. I definitely would have paid $6 a month to keep using Apollo.

anaganisk 3y ago
The percentage of their party apps, vs people using the first party app, just based on Google play downloads is very miniscule. It is like saying using youtube-dl to consume YouTube is killing it. I mean we all love sponsor block and uBlock origin, do we have the same sympathy for YouTube?
- dimmke 3y ago
  The other thing about this that is so crazy is that services like Facebook Twitter and Instagram have all had heavily locked down APIs for a long time. Like, you couldn’t just start using their API you had to sign up and get approval. It moated social media management software like Hootsuite. I know this because at one of my previous roles they wanted us to build a simple version of software like that and integrate it into their content management system but we couldn’t without also paying the full ticket for third party SaaS so it killed the project. They could switch to something like that. Where compliance is checked and revoked. It would kill bots but not apps. But this was never designed to work, it’s how disingenuous it is that pisses me off.
Dah00n 3y ago
>NSFW poison pill Could you explain what you mean by this?
- dimmke 3y ago
  Something that has gotten lost amidst all the pricing talk is that Reddit said their API would also stop serving any content marked as NSFW, essentially making it useless for any third party app (general use or moderator use) even if they could come to an agreement on pricing.

efficax 3y ago

> Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly compute isn't free man. it probably costs millions of dollars a year just to pay the cloud providers to support those apps. i doubt that's a lie...

appletrotter 3y ago
Well simple logic would say that if they get $.12 per user/month, the costs to serve each user (in terms of compute) is probably below $.12 or else they would be losing money, no?
- alickz 3y ago
  i thought they _were_ losing money?
  - appletrotter 3y ago
    Reddit likely could’ve taken profit in recent years, but was instead focused on growth. Reddit doubled its headcount in 2021. There’s no reason to think that compute is a constraining cost for reddit imo. They produce what is at this point legacy tech.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  $.12 is MAU, which visit sites few times a week. Apollo devs claim his users make 250 reqs/d, which is very different users and there is likely huge gap in costs numbers between cohorts.
  - appletrotter 3y ago
    MAU as a figure cannot be a dollar amount, but instead only an integer no? Silly. Maybe you’re thinking of ARPU? Even if the ARPU was an order of magnitude higher, it would still be half as much as Reddit is charging per user to 3PAs. It’s not about compute cost, because compute cost is almost definitely below revenue and the fees being charged don’t seem to have any direct link to it anyway. Compute cost per user must generally be below ARPU, right? So even if a 3PA user cost 5x in terms of compute, at most that would be $.75 if they’re making no profit. Significantly less than the $2.50 3PAs are being charged per user per month. tldr: reddit is charging significantly more for API access than is reasonable to expect it costs them even in lost revenue, let alone raw compute