All the 3pa’s shut down business the moment the actual API prices were announced. This wasn’t a protest move, the prices were simply 20 times higher than what they were promised and impossible to work into their business model. Reddit couldn’t have overcharged and continued as normal - it was a deliberate move to kill off 3pa while pretending they are not. Reddit COULD have charged this API price to users directly via Reddit Premium, but failed to do so.
I think it also important to note that it wasn’t just the pricing itself, which was indeed already heinous, but that the rate calculation changed. It used to be a rate per user per app (apikey+oauth) but they changed that to just the per app … that then has a multiplicative effect on the costs and makes the “free tier” they were talking about especially pointless…
It would be easy for an app to start at free tier … not have much growth through word of mouth but enough given the per app rates to push it over boundary points … and then be due a significant and unavoidable invoice in a couple of months…
