I just don't understand why developers underprice their apps so much. You're talking about an app that people are constantly raving about, and that people use for multiple hours per day. Charge $5/month, that's half the price of Netflix or Disney+.
Same with Twitter. So many businesses were built upon basically free API access and are now shocked the company responsible for their app's customer appeal wants some of that action.
It's not Reddit's responsibility to float OP's business and make it profitable. OP's billions of monthly requests have a real cost for Reddit - and now that Reddit's API is so coveted, they can charge whatever they want for it's access.
No Twitter - no Twitter App.
No Reddit - no Reddit App.
It's really simple...
Apple takes at least 15% of that, or 30% depending on the developer's revenue, leaving $2.55 or $2.10.
Reddit even gives each user 100 API queries per minutes for free.
Why can't apps use that to access the data for each user?
When I go use an app that talks to OpenAI for example, it asks me to put in my API key. So why not just do that for third party reddit apps?
I think the app can just ask the user to OAuth with it and then it should be able to use that user's API access up to the free rate limits.