It’s not like the person on the other end of the line had no idea exactly what he was proposing. Even if the dev isn’t experienced at negotiating something like this you can bet the person on the other end of the line was.
Actually, I'm not sure if it's entirely clear to anyone on the other side (or even the world at large) how to value something. To a large extent, Reddit has drunk the cool aid and internalized that APIs are worth X. So going to a meeting with the implicit assumption that everyone knows that pricing is BS is not a safe assumption. They've already had the pricing discussion, so throwing more oblique references to BS pricing is not productive. It's like in a normal human argument. Once you are at an impasse, throwing more facts or presenting a logical paradox doesn't change the other person's mind.
