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, Twitter et all don't owe you anything. They do not make money via read-access API calls - they lose money. It's super simple...
Only a fool would build a business around a free service with no escape plan.
Twitter eliminated 3rd party clients, and now Twitter is estimated to be worth 1/3 of its acquisition price.
Lastly - Twitter's market price has nothing to do with it's profitability. That seems obvious, but apparently needs to be said here.
They are just truly shitty at make a working app. It's really not a business or what, just the official one truly don't work.
Popup ad to notification is already bad, pretend it to be user message? How the fxxk do they think it is going to encourage the engagement?
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.
It's not profitable. That's why they're cutting to the bone and not even paying a lot of their bills.
They had to make an advertising exec the nominal CEO, because a lot of advertisers have fled the platform.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/27/tech/elon-musk-twitter-si...
It sounded like an OAuth'd user gets an individual allocation of free rate limited API queries (100 per minute).
I wouldn't call that Apollo app's author a fool. My understanding is they were turning a profit from the app up to now. So, apparently, it was a nice business. It's just that their business model is about to stop working.
Well, that happens to other business too sometimes. They'll have to adapt somehow or come up with another business. Life as usual.