Snippet: Reddit Drank Some of the Twitter Kool-Aid ☇

Christian Selig, developer of the wonderful Apollo app for Reddit:

I’ll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.

Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.

I’m deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that the price would be A) reasonable and based in reality, and B) they would not operate like Twitter. Twitter’s pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit’s is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.

At this point, if you’re developing a third-party client for any closed social network, it may be time to start thinking of something new. Unlike Twitter, which had an abrupt shut down of third-party clients with no communication, Reddit is giving some notice, but the pricing is making it where most clients will be unsustainable. Like Twitter, the native app for Reddit is also terrible, making this change an even more disappointing.