Reddit announced that 3rd party apps will now have to pay to use its API, seemly to increase revenue as well as limit the scraping of its data from various AI startups that are training models. The pricing is $0.24 per 1000 API calls and with many 3rd party apps doing millions of requests per day, it would cost millions of dollars per month. As many 3rd party apps have free users, this would not be sustainable for these apps. Several apps including Apollo have notified users that they will be shutting down.
On April 18th, Reddit announced changes that would be coming to the API, namely that the API is moving to a paid model for third-party apps. Shortly thereafter we received phone calls, however the price (the key element in an announcement to move to a paid API) was notably missing, with the intent to follow up with it in 2-4 weeks.
The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it’s not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they’re looking to do equitable pricing based in reality. They mentioned that they were not looking to be like Twitter, which has API pricing so high it was publicly ridiculed.
I was excited to hear these statements, as I agree that long-term Reddit footing the bill for third-party apps is not tenable, and with a paid arrangement there’s a great possibility for developing a more concrete relationship with Reddit, with better API support for users. I think this optimism came across in my first post about the calls with Reddit.
