I say pretty clearly that I'm talking about purely theoretical numbers. The underlying fact is that the status quo is probably unsustainable for Reddit. It's hard to be "blatantly wrong" about a series of hypotheticals, IMO.
There's a lot of strange stuff happening in your comment. On the one hand, let's take for granted that Reddit is charging 20x its revenue per average user for the API. But that's just the average user; as you yourself point out "the vast majority of people subscribing to Apollo are power users". Surely they are worth much more to Reddit than the average, extremely casual user?
The underlying problem explained in the post is that the author pre-sold access to Reddit through an app to users, while this access was actually conditioned on the continuing availability of access to the Reddit API. No doubt this does put the author in an uncomfortable position! Given that the current plan is to shut down the app anyway, surely cancelling active subscriptions should also be on the table? Subscribers are going to lose access to Reddit through Apollo either way! So realistically, what we're talking about here is whether $5/month is a reasonable price point for power users. My answer is... maybe?
I think my instinct is to say that this is all ultimately the place where negotiations are supposed to happen. Reddit needs to go from making zero dollars off the API to making something. Is what they want to charge too high? Probably so. But a lot of people are acting as if any charge at all is untenable.
> But a lot of people are acting as if any charge at all is untenable.
Is that the case? Every reaction I have seen has been to the magnitude of the price, which is much, much, much more than what Reddit makes off of users
There's a lot of strange stuff happening in your comment. On the one hand, let's take for granted that Reddit is charging 20x its revenue per average user for the API. But that's just the average user; as you yourself point out "the vast majority of people subscribing to Apollo are power users". Surely they are worth much more to Reddit than the average, extremely casual user?
The underlying problem explained in the post is that the author pre-sold access to Reddit through an app to users, while this access was actually conditioned on the continuing availability of access to the Reddit API. No doubt this does put the author in an uncomfortable position! Given that the current plan is to shut down the app anyway, surely cancelling active subscriptions should also be on the table? Subscribers are going to lose access to Reddit through Apollo either way! So realistically, what we're talking about here is whether $5/month is a reasonable price point for power users. My answer is... maybe?
I think my instinct is to say that this is all ultimately the place where negotiations are supposed to happen. Reddit needs to go from making zero dollars off the API to making something. Is what they want to charge too high? Probably so. But a lot of people are acting as if any charge at all is untenable.
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