Update from DBrady, creator of Relay for Reddit (not me!):
Update: Relay will continue to operate from July 1st. It will be moving to a subscription model in the coming weeks but, for now, it’s available for everyone to use free of charge and ad-free!
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in updating everyone on the future of Relay. It’s taken until now for me to work things out.
For the time being, Relay is going to be free for everyone to use (this means no fees and no ads) while i continue optimising API calls and finalising subscription prices. I’m working hard to get call volumes down and i’ll try my best to hit as low a price point as possible, at least for a base tier that covers 85-90% of users. At the higher end of usage it’s looking like i’ll need to implement a few different price points but this is still something i need to figure out. I’ll let you know when i do.
Thanks again for all the incredible messages over the last week. I’ve seen them all and they really mean a lot - knowing how long some people have been using Relay for is amazing. For anyone moving on from here, thanks for supporting Relay over the last 12 years - i’m forever grateful.
Relay Pro (should now be free to use): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=reddit.news
Relay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2sTb4GzEz4
Cheers,
Dave
This seems quite clever by Reddit. It looks like there’s some deal that if they remove ads from their apps they get free api usage for a few months. Seems suspicous that both apps doing this have removed ads.
This will soften the blow a little for Reddit as now at least 1 decent sized 3rd party app on each platform (Android/IOS) will continue to work for a while.
A clever PR move that changes nothing.
API fee is not free, only delayed. I have no idea how the devs will handle the combined bill when it comes. It’ll be a huge bill while income from subscriptions have not really picked up yet. I would not take this risk even if someone give me Appollo source code for free.
The new API requires you to remove ads regardless, they could get banned by reddit for serving their own ads.
You’re right that this is a PR move rather than a genuine attempt to work with devs, but I think it would have been more clever if Reddit had done this three weeks ago, when they could have undermined the “this will kill third party apps” narrative. Instead, they waited until Huffman had spouted off about how he admires Elon, who killed Twitter’s third party apps, and how the API was “never meant” for third party apps. Basically, he has expressed a personal desire to see third party apps killed, and usually the CEO’s opinion overrules official company statements with this kind of thing. So now, it’s going to be hard for the company to turn around and claim that killing third party apps isn’t their end goal.
@fruitcake119 I thought Reddit intentionally doesn’t funnel ads to or allow 3rd party apps to have ads?
It doesn’t, but several apps were previously funded by sourcing their own ads. That’s why the double-whammy of Reddit hiking API charges to 20X their own costs and prohibiting third-party apps from showing their own ads was such a problem - by prohibiting ads, Reddit was saying that apps effectively had to be funded by charging users, they couldn’t just go find outside sources of funding.
