He has a point, no? Sure, there's a middle ground where API access is priced so both Reddit and Apollo make money. But Apollo can offer a better experience because they don't have to sell ads, and if they get a large enough market share they can just start their own Reddit.. the codebase is not an effective moat.
It is the vastly superior app. That said, Reddit thinks it can get significantly more profit per user itself or it wouldn't be pricing the API so high Apollo had to shut down. I think they are laughably wrong, but they clearly don't see it as worthwhile vs whatever they are planning.
Everyone knows what profit motive is, cost of doing business, etc. Assume you're talking to people who know what it takes to run a website, and start, first, with the numbers that have been calculated.
According to apollo app, to keep their 3rd party app running, reddit was requesting about $20 million dollars. If you go look at what apollo charges, it's significantly less than that.
Reddit's defense of that charge isnt: Apollo is taking our users, our ad revenue and we want that to be in-house, in our own app, etc. They're saying "this is the cost of the API".
Now, start there, and dial in your criticism to some actual details.
The argument you are putting forth boils down to folks like Apollo should receive free API access because they increase the usefulness of Reddit for end-users.
That would be a fair argument, except for the fact that nothing is really free and Apollo currently makes millions in profit at Reddit's expense.
That is not sustainable... any business should have realized this right from the beginning. Apollo's own business model requires income to continue to run... so Reddit's doesn't?
This is just a silly discussion to be having. Of course Apollo and businesses like Apollo were going to be required to pay for API access at some point. The business owner complaining "it's not fair", or that it's not priced like API's that nobody cares about is just staggering.
> every user using Apollo instead of their own first party apps is lost revenue.
This isn't true if they're charging for API access. At best it's a question of whether the lost ad revenue is being compensated for by API revenue.
If you want to attribute an ulterior motive here I'm guessing it's more about control. They want their users to use Reddit as they want them to use Reddit, or at least they'd like to reserve the right to that power.
Reddit makes money off of ads, and Apollo doesn’t show ads. The same was the case for Twitter and Tweetbot. In some ways, Christian is directly capturing revenue that Reddit otherwise would.
I would agree that the proposed API pricing is not a workable starting point, but I do think Apollo (and, by proxy, its users) will eventually have to pay Reddit something.
Reddit has to make money in order to exist, and Apollo is undercutting them by providing an ad-free experience for less money than Reddit would be making from ads. You don't see the problem?
> But Apollo can offer a better experience because they don't have to sell ads...
Reddit could require serving their ads as a requirement for API access. Right now there is no way for Apollo to serve reddit ads even if they wanted to.
Apollo’s developer has stated multiple times that he has no problem with Reddit charging for API access.
The problem is that they are charging so much for it that it will kill all of the third party apps, which is likely one of reddits main goals with the change.
> Reddit doesn't want to work with third-party apps
This sentiment is obviously false. Reddit doesn't want to support third-party apps at Reddit's own expense. That is reasonable.
> He has 50,000 customers who paid $10/year for the app
And now we get to the issue. This was never a sustainable business model. It depended on Reddit API being free - even at the massive volume Apollo operates at. That is unreasonable.
Monetization and growth go hand-in-hand. I'm an old.reddit.com user (even on MoWeb, I know I'm a psycho), but the way people talk about Apollo is like it's absolutely superior to the current Reddit app. If I were Reddit, and my users loved this third-party product _so much_, I would at least explore promoting Apollo to a first-class interface for browsing Reddit.
For the scale of Reddit as a company, it's likely a trivial deal; whereas the cross-pollination of ideas and UI/UX learnings could easily be worth more than the cost of collaborating.
Nobody thinks that, not even the Apollo author, which is why the problem is not that Reddit is charging for access to the APIs, but that they are charging far more than the amount they’re losing.
I agree. The Apollo dev arguably owns the user last-mile. It wouldn't be a stretch to offer users an alternative. Reddit was open source until 2017 (https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit) so most of the heavy dev lifting is already done. The major cost would be in infrastructure.
Reddit told the Apollo developer the API pricing was more opportunity cost than actual cost. And many people suggested Reddit could make 3rd party access a subscription feature.
This argument doesn't hold water. Licensing can charge commercial reuse differently, and technology can have 3rd party apps use OAuth, and reddit can enable that OAuth solely for users with Reddit Gold Plus, to get whatever they think they need per user.
It's users using the API, to contribute the content. If Reddit stopped to think it through, they'd realize content contributed by Apollo users is better for LLMs.
Finally, if it cost users to use the API, Reddit gets paid, apps compete on their own merits as they do today, and the pile miners pay for commercial harvesting of the content users paid reddit and the app builders to let them post.
It's hard to see why Reddit thinks their current approach is the cleverest.
But it would be very simple for Reddit to require ads to be served in Apollo. They could say that in order to view a feed of posts at scale, you'll have to include ads that are injected into the feed. They could revoke the API token for any clients which don't do that. In fact, there are plenty of ways for Reddit to get their money back.
Simply put, the Reddit CEO definitely wants to kill 3rd party apps. He just knows that saying it out loud would have an even bigger backlash. With the current approach, he can pretend to care about 3rd party apps, but do everything to make it financially impossible to run one.
The developer of Apollo was clear that the problem wasn’t that Reddit wanted to charge for API usage, it was the price.
Reddit could have just made third party client use a feature of Reddit premium and avoid all of the current issues. Yes, some would still complain that Reddit costs anything to use but big clients have paying customers and are less price sensitive.
I don't understand that guy's argument. So Apollo is costing Reddit 10 million due to their API traffic and he wants Reddit to pay Apollo 10 mil to stop it? How is that better than cutting off their access which would cost reddit zero dollars?
I'm not a webdev so I understand if this point is naive. The Apollo dev said the cost will be about 20x what Reddit pays for its user. Obviously Reddit needs and can maintain a competitive advantage by having a native app. So charging more per user for a 3rd party app is not unreasonable.
For the sake of simplicity let's say that reddit makes $1.00 per user per month that uses their app. Currently they make no money on third party apps. All third party app devs seem fine paying a price to use the API as that is standard practice for different websites. It seems like Reddit could have just charged them 3.00 Per user per month, so they get a healthy margin off of the third party apps. They would actually be making money off of third party apps, and if everyone used the third party app over the native one, then they would be making 3x what they would with users using the native one.
3x seems like a healthy enough margin for me, and they win whether we use their app or not. Devs like Apollo would have a lot more options for monetizing it's users at 3x Reddit's price per user than at 20x. Everyone seems to win. Instead they went with the move that is obviously intended to kill third party apps, and face major backlash from its most devoted users in a self own. The path seems simple to me but maybe that's why I'm not a CEO.
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