“Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app,” the Reddit worker said.

This reminds me of the “average user” Comcast would talk about when they introduced price discrimination metered billing. Just include the long tail of lurkers and signups who almost never use the service, and you can claim that the Apollo users (who are power users) are just outliers who should pay more.

Ultimately for me this is a reminder that when there’s a for-profit business ramping up to an IPO, it ultimately has to decide what the products are. Reddit tried to make itself the product with Reddit Gold, but clearly not enough people were paying for it, so it has to make users the product. It’s hard to “monetize” users through someone else’s app, so they’ve basically decided that for app users, if the developers figure out how to sell a very expensive service, more power to them, otherwise fuck 'em.

Now replace “Reddit” with “Reddit mods” and see how it changes the dynamic instantly.