I moved over to Relay after 12 years of using Reddit is Fun. When I got the notification that Relay will implement a subscription feature I was excited that this app will at least stick around. Then against my better judgement I decided to finally download the official Reddit app to check out if it's really so bad that it's worth spending 60$ a year to have to use it. It's so much worse. The layout and UI are so bad and unintuitive. Everything looks like a toy version of Reddit. I don't know if there is no frontpage or if it's just so hidden behind other bullshit that I couldn't find it but instead I was presented with my "Home Page" which was a mix of popular subreddits and subreddits (or excuse me "communities" is apparently the word they chose) that where picked based on my location. So instead of content I'm actually subscribed to most of what I was shown was TV shows I've never heard of, football teams I don't care about and news about German YouTubers.

I tried to check out some individual subreddits and while getting there the first time is tedious it's much more annoying that every subreddit you look at for any amount of time gets pinned at the top of the list in a recently used tab. This clutters everything up even more. I deleted the app after around 10 minutes and decided this is definitely worth the money I'll pay for the subscription. And I never had a subscription to an app or game or anything except Spotify and Netflix. But I'll pay to not have to use the shitty official Reddit App. I'm lucky enough that I can pay for the subscription. This app is actually really great.

TL:DR It's worth more than the price to not have to use the official app.

Hey all,

I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.

Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars 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, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month.

I'm deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that the price would be A) reasonable and based in reality, and B) they would not operate like Twitter. Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.

As for the pricing, despite claims that it would be based in reality, it seems anything but. Less than 2 years ago they said they crossed $100M in quarterly revenue for the first time ever, if we assume despite the economic downturn that they've managed to do that every single quarter now, and for your best quarter, you've doubled it to $200M. Let's also be generous and go far, far above industry estimates and say you made another $50M in Reddit Premium subscriptions. That's $550M in revenue per year, let's say an even $600M. In 2019, they said they hit 430 million monthly active users, and to also be generous, let's say they haven't added a single active user since then (if we do revenue-per-user calculations, the more users, the less revenue each user would contribute). So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well.

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. The average subscription user currently uses 473 requests, which would cost $3.51, or 29x higher.

While Reddit has been communicative and civil throughout this process with half a dozen phone calls back and forth that I thought went really well, I don't see how this pricing is anything based in reality or remotely reasonable. I hope it goes without saying that I don't have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card.

This is going to require some thinking. I asked Reddit if they were flexible on this pricing or not, and they stated that it's their understanding that no, this will be the pricing, and I'm free to post the details of the call if I wish.

- Christian

(For the uninitiated wondering "what the heck is an API anyway and why is this so important?" it's just a fancy term for a way to access a site's information ("Application Programming Interface"). As an analogy, think of Reddit having a bouncer, and since day one that bouncer has been friendly, where if you ask "Hey, can you list out the comments for me for post X?" the bouncer would happily respond with what you requested, provided you didn't ask so often that it was silly. That's the Reddit API: I ask Reddit/the bouncer for some data, and it provides it so I can display it in my app for users. The proposed changes mean the bouncer will still exist, but now ask an exorbitant amount per question.)

It's been less than a day and I miss Apollo. Happy Canada Day though fellas

In light of Reddit’s API costs (12k per 50M requests), I got to wondering what something like Reddit could cost per user just in terms of infrastructure.

Reddit claims a 3rd party app could service a user for 2.50/month, which is $30/year. I’m not some cloud wizard but that seems way too high for what Reddit incurs per user. Given their current revenue per user, they’d basically never be profitable! Twitter made about $20/user, Snapchat and Pinterest are close to $8/user.

Snapchat sort of shares its costs in its financials. If you take infra costs and divide by users you get something like ~$2.50 per year. My guess is Reddit is right around there too. Thoughts?

For me it's gonna be Apple Music and Capcut Pro. Even though Capcut became really greedy if we are being Honest.