Who ever came up with that price is looking for short-term profits over user happiness and long-term growth.
It comes off as extremely entitled to think that reddit should supply you with the data created by their platform to do what you want with it.
Reddit exists _despite_ Reddit's incompetent management and tech teams, not thanks to them.
And it IMO, is anti-competitive - they are intentionally killing all existing competitors, vs. improving their own offering.
So, if you already have a sophisticated ad tech and sales team, you'd be able to pull 50%+ profit margin without having to worry about running the infrastructure for content.
That being said, there's maybe only a handful of companies with a more competent ad tech/sales team than Reddit, and Reddit's is pretty damn bad. So while the numbers make sense, the strategy does not given the competencies available in the market they're trying to sell in.
they're passion hobby projects that'll disappear rather than turn into a job
If you're building your business to be completely reliant on another unsustainable, unprofitable business, don't be too surprised when they ask you to help row or get off the boat before it sinks.
For API restrictions, Reddit has been in a doomed if they do, doomed if they don't situation for a while now. I think there's about a thousand other better decisions they could've made before being forced to make this one about API usage, but I also don't see their numbers and their time simply might've already run out.
but those users don't see ads on 3rd party apps. they already know what all they can implement to improve user experience. they just wont, willingly
If I have a backyard and let you host a couple concerts in it free of charge and then next year I decide "hmm, I think I should be paid for those concerts you're hosting in my backyard" is that anti-competitive?
Absolutely not.
That's only one side of it though. According to the same post, Reddit's ad revenue is closer to $0.12/user/month. So, they are apparently willing to sell traffic to advertisers for a much much lower price than API users.
That's pretty much the definition of enshittification.
An app that uses reddit is not a competitor to reddit, it's a client of reddit. No definition of "anti-competitive" applies here.
Now, whether this constitutes “anti competitive” in the legal sense is probably not going to fly in court: it’s unlikely Reddit can be compelled to offer an API at any particular price. It’s their service, they can do what they want with it. Rather, it’s a lesson that third parties should not be developing clients for other company’s services, as it is building a foundation on quicksand.