The pricing is actually reasonable, thats the annoying part. The free tier is good enough for tweaks and MVPs, this is the opposite of what Twitter did which effectively ended experimentation on their API.
The paid tier is reasonable, $12k for 50 million requests (1/4th of twitter api) means Opollo will be paying $1.68 million a month. Thats entirely reasonable for such a popular Reddit app.
This gets us back to the original point, users got used to subsidised pricing (free) so Reddit was inevitably gonna get blowback no matter how they spliced this. To put it in perspective, $1.68m is 168k users paying $10/m a month. They have 1.5m active monthly users. Thats means they only need 10% of their active users to be paying customers.
P.S.
Its not just a need to generate revenue, if they don't become profitable soon its game over for the current investors and management team. The IPO markets have dried up and nobody is touching anything series A and above.
SV's darling Stripe had to cut their valuation by 50% to get some money, Reddit wont be able to get anything near that. The best they'll get is some private equity type deal (FATAL).
The paid tier is reasonable, $12k for 50 million requests (1/4th of twitter api) means Opollo will be paying $1.68 million a month. Thats entirely reasonable for such a popular Reddit app.
This gets us back to the original point, users got used to subsidised pricing (free) so Reddit was inevitably gonna get blowback no matter how they spliced this. To put it in perspective, $1.68m is 168k users paying $10/m a month. They have 1.5m active monthly users. Thats means they only need 10% of their active users to be paying customers.
P.S. Its not just a need to generate revenue, if they don't become profitable soon its game over for the current investors and management team. The IPO markets have dried up and nobody is touching anything series A and above.
SV's darling Stripe had to cut their valuation by 50% to get some money, Reddit wont be able to get anything near that. The best they'll get is some private equity type deal (FATAL).