The conversation is really only about free vs not free. Everything else is a smokescreen.
Apollo also does polling of the message box for each user for push notifications ( https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/main/i... ) which currently has a rate of 1/minute/user. This is another 1.4k calls per day and changes the price that would be paid.
Current rate: https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/blob/b992d2...
March 16th rate update (6 r/m to 1r/m): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/commit/74a8...
Nov 22nd rate update (12 r/m to 6 r/m): https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend/commit/7582...
But I think there’s a huge difference between that charge being 20 cents and $2 (or 50 cents and $5).
If Reddit is saying "it's $2 for the 300 calls per day" that is claimed for the mobile app usage they're correct looking at what they charge for API calls based on the developer saying that the average user does 345 calls/day from the mobile app.
From the app develop perspective who also has a polling back end and an apple subscription cut and maintaining the same profit as before on top of it all, they're likely looking at closer to $20/month for that same user (noting that previously they were charing $4.99 and it was almost all profit for that user).