Apollo, the popular Reddit app for iOS, could face millions of dollars in fees as a result of Reddit’s new paid API model. According to an update posted by developer Christian Selig, Reddit could charge Apollo roughly $20 million per year if it continues operating at its current scale.
Reddit announced changes to its API policy in April, which allows the platform to put limits on the number of API requests made by a third-party client like Apollo. But now, we have more details on what exactly this means: Selig says Reddit plans on charging about $12,000 per 50 million requests.
Reddit looked at Twitter and thought now that’s how you run a business.
And that’s why I use neither Reddit nor Twitter in any platform. (Nor Facebook, their companion).
franzrogar,
This is a lesson that developers need to learn as well. While reddit’s plan to monetize the API is obviously frustrating for the developer in the article, IMHO he bares some responsibility for putting his eggs in someone else’s basket. Reddit is entitled to charge what it wants and developers need to become wise to the perils of getting in bed with centralized platforms.
Alfman,
I think in this case, it is reasonable for Reddit to charge for the API. (The timeline can be questioned, though.)
But as you mentioned, building your product entirely dependent on another platform comes with a major risk. Even today, I am working on a few projects that could use the GPT api from OpenAI, however I am also looking for backups. (Bard/PalM might be a choice. Or building our own, but that requires massive scale and investment).
If these really became commodities, like Jabber / IRC / email, there would be a natural limit on the API prices. AI might become so, if there are more than 3-4 players. But “siloed” platforms carry a major risk, hence one needs to keep “minimum common denominator” in mind.
I also cannot find any reason for blaming Reddit or Twitter about this “mess”. Some devs go for the easy money by building a simple frontend to someone elses’s data and servers, and then they get cut out just as easily. They’re also monetizing their own apps while seemingly getting the infrastucture for free, or at an extremely low cost as mentioned with regards to Imgur.
Now, I can’t comment on whether $12 per 50,000 API calls is a fair price or not, but if your app is mindlessly making requests and accessing data, you ought to be paying for it too.
Maybe
power usersaddicts should be charged more for their access to social media platforms?Quote: “Some devs go for the easy money by building a simple frontend to someone elses’s data and servers…”
Let’s call it a “web browser”. Would you agree so websites started to charge for the “frontend” (real case scenario: News sites wanted to charge Google News for the excerpts shown)?
This case is just the same but instead of websites/websearcher we have API/frontend.
The web browser and Google News are totally different examples.
Websites are made expecting you to use a web browser to consume them, it is the expected behavior that they want their users to use.
Google News would aggregate news from a bunch of different services, which might be beneficial to the user, but not the news site as they would want the user to go browse their site to find the news, and this way hopefully click on more articles and generate more ad revenue.
I assume 3rd party Reddit apps does the same, grants access to the contents without Reddit being able to show ads. So this might be bad for the users, but be good for Reddit, even if their active user count decreases a bit, both because they get to show more ads, and because they no longer have to give out 100 billion free requests to just this app. (handling 100 billion requests is far from free)
franzrogar,
This is not the same as news sites asking compensation for having snippets of their content featured on another product. In fact, it is significantly different. (Snippets are crawled once and not requested every time. News articles are rendered in the web browser as normal).
This is also different than web browsers as well, where users issue http queries directly to the services.
The app is using both the reddit data, and the cloud resources as a middle man. There are alternative schemes, for example, asking users to provide their api keys (happens in many ealy chatgpt apps). If that was the case, the deal is between the end user and the service again
@franzrogar
if you really think this is the same, you would have stopped using webbrowsers, like you stopped using twitter and reddit, right? 😉
“if your app is mindlessly making requests and accessing data, you ought to be paying for it too.”
I’m not sure it should, for a long time there wasn’t an official reddit app. Reddit was helped by third parties that integrated into the api and provided that missing part. Now Reddit has an official app and doesn’t need it anymore. So I guess I understand Reddit’s perspective, and obviously they have every right to choose to charge access to its platform. But I don’t think in general that providing better access to some one else’s data should always require a payment to be made.
Its like a networking peering agreement. If both sides are profiting equally, then no payment between them should be made. But if there is an imbalance, sure payment makes sense. For network traffic thats a lot easier to quantify but for these api consuming apps thats a lot more difficult. Maybe it should be something more sophisticated, like based on add impressions per api request (are there ads sent along with the api data? if not there should be).
I’d be happy to use the official Reddit app if the official Reddit app was any good. Sorry, but the Apollo app is lightyears ahead of what Reddit officially offers…
If that’s the case, then reddit should provide a better rate for a better experience. Make these third parties work with you to give you’re mutual customers the best experience possible.
Or…. jack up the price for API access, drive down the feasibility of competing with the official app, then buy your competitor for peanuts?
Not likely.
For what reason would they want a product that does not do ads and ram promoted nonsense into your face?
They think people will use the official version. They are wrong.
Monatisation is why we can’t have nice things.
Onward to whatever the next platform is….
“Monatisation is why we can’t have nice things.”
Euh, we got Reddit because of the ads.
Running a bunch of AWS services isn’t exactly free you know ?
Or employing people, including developers.
Lennie,
Lack of proper monetization is why we had Twitter sold to Elon Musk.
If they can’t make money, owners will have to sell off, even at a loss. Or, expect bankruptcy, which is even worse in the long run.
sukru,
I get your point, but companies are bought and sold all the time and this doesn’t automatically imply they aren’t lucrative. Everyone’s got a price and the fact a company gots sold simply means somebody was able to meet that price.and not necessarily that there were monetization problems.
Regarding twitter, they probably did need some layoffs. Although it’s not every day we as much drama as what happened to twitter, musk really took a wrecking ball to the company. I bet the company’s balance sheets are worse than before he took over.
Alfman,
I would use a “sledgehammer” reference, but I am with you on this one.
I used reddit many years ago to read the polandball comics and nothing else. Then they redesigned the website and i never went back again.
You know you can force Reddit to use old mode. You can doe it without login in by using old.reddit.com/r/… as the URL or as an option in our profile.
I’m a bit torn on this one. On the one hand, charging for API access will cause developers like this one to have to abandon their products. Which will reduce choice.
But on the other, this is the cost of someone like Reddit running an API service. Especially in cloud computing, processing this amount of data costs real money and uses real energy which has real environmental impact. A developer can’t expect to be immune to the overheads of a system they are profiting off of.
I like people who still write “off of”.
Like that guy, you know, the one off of the telly.
Is that a sign of my age?? I genuinely don’t know!
At this point, the open-source community should start developing scrapper tools to provide unofficial re-implementations of the APIs for those services, just like they developed YouTube downloader utils. Reddit and Twitter can’t stop that unless they put a captcha on every page. With so much knowledge locked up in Reddit (Reddit is a lot like all those tech forums we used to have), and with Twitter being the defacto site for announcements, I think those two websites are worth being accessible by API and without restrictions even if you don’t like them as websites.
PS: https://ibb.co/YL8ZfGb
kurkosdr,
Haha, that’s an amusing diagram about scrapping 🙂
I’ve done it plenty of times, however scrapping is fraught with problems.
Some I’ve built include search engine scrappers, physician portal scrapper (we actually had a provider API, but it was insufficient). IMDB scrapper for a side project. a google maps scrapper, a UPS/USPS/Fedex/DHS/NewPenn/etc scrapper. This scrapper was used by company that wanted automatic quotes from all the local carriers without employees having to manually get quotes from each one. They can be very useful when they work, but honestly, given the choice, I’d take a stable API over scrapping any day. Scrapping is bloated & fragile at best and can even get the whole organization blocked if you do it without permission, which is really bad.
In terms of writing a new front end for reddit. I suppose someone could do it, but my thinking is that if you have users, then it would be better to build an alternative service.
That’s the thing, you won’t be given a choice. As we enter a bear market, all those ad-supported sites will seek ways to monetize their API so they can lock their content behind walled gardens. I mean, it would also be great if YouTube provided an API to download the videos, but they don’t, that’s why the open source community has developed scrapper tools.
Basically, HTML is the only common pre-agreed non-tollboothed standard we have.
kurkosdr,
I disagree with this. Obviously sometimes APIs aren’t an option. but the majority of integrations I’ve worked on did not require scrapping, I’ve worked on so many API integrations I cannot count them. Yet 100% of the scrapping implementations I’ve worked on required constant monitoring because they’d all break without notice. Some scrappers ended up getting blocked. If your working for a bottom feeder company, maybe you can play wack-a-mole and constantly buy proxy IPs to disguise your requests. But if you’re an enterprise business with a large user base dependent on 24/7 uptime, then personally I’d strongly recommend finding a business model where you don’t have to scrape properties you don’t own without permission. Just my 2c.
I do get what you are saying, If a developer wants to write a new FOSS front end for an existing web property, then scrapping may be the only way to do it, even if it isn’t robust.
kurkosdr,
Yeah, if you don’t have a choice, then you don’t have a choice.
Still, the vast majority of the data integrations I’ve worked on did use APIs, thankfully. Most providers realize that without an API, it makes it more difficult to do business with them.
It obviously depends on the nature of business and reddit’s motives for providing public APIs may be quite a bit different than the providers I typically deal with, however with businesses dependent on strong partnerships then having a good API is a business advantage.
I am not familiar with it, but does the youtube app use an API under the hood or is it little more than a webpage in an application wrapper?
Anyway, I do follow what you are saying. I think that services that are heavily ads based face a conflict of interest in providing the public with APIs since the public could then use the APIs to develop a better ad-free experience.
It was nice using Reddit while it lasted. Another Digg moment.
It would be nice if everybody went back to using traditional forums for discussion, and we could just use something like Tapatalk everywhere.
Usenet forever 🙂
Seriously though. long ago it was normal for technology & networks to be built around open federated services where users could run the software of their choice while using the providers of their choice. This was good for users since they were not dependent on one monopolistic provider/developer. Then everything changed, the giant internet corporations didn’t want users to have the freedom of federated networks, they wanted users to be captive to their services alone. And so new technology investment would end up going towards proprietary networks and eschew federated ones. This is how we ended up with the internet evolving away from cooperative providers to jails where a few corporations own the networks and control the innovation.