This is not a fight over access fees, it's a fight for data. The fees are prohibitive deliberately, to guarantee nobody makes more money than Reddit out of user generated data.
Effective July 1, 2023, the rate limits to use the Data API free of charge are:
100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication and 10 queries per minute if you are not using OAuth authentication.
Today, over 90% of apps fall into this category and can continue to access the Data API for free.
Premium Enterprise API / Third-party apps
Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app).
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So users are happy to pay, say, Netflix $15 a month, but are outraged when Reddit tries to charge heavy app users $1 a month?
1k API calls is nothing, and I severely doubt it costs them 24 cents to provide 1k API calls.
Besides, they're not charging "heavy app users". They're charging "the apps". They are ensuring that the only entities that would even be able to afford their API costs are large businesses. As much money as Selig was making from Apollo, even he was unable to continue offering the app under these terms. Do you want increased capitalistic control of the Internet? Because this is one further step down that road, that I fear we may already be too far down.
"1k API calls is nothing, and I severely doubt it costs them 24 cents to provide 1k API calls."
Whoever said anything about whether it cost Reddit 24 cents to provide 1k API calls?
This subthread is about whether what Reddit is charging for API calls is "prohibitive", not about what it cost Reddit.
"Besides, they're not charging "heavy app users". They're charging "the apps"."
They're charging whoever uses Reddit's API keys, and I don't understand why third-party app users can't just use their own API keys and pay for their own API usage.
"As much money as Selig was making from Apollo, even he was unable to continue offering the app under these terms."
Why couldn't he just pass the costs down to the users of his app? Or just ask them to use their own API keys?
