The Staggering Cost of Reddit’s API
Christian Selig, developer of the splendid Reddit client Apollo:
I’ll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.
Christian Selig — Reddit
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 userbase and media, $166 for the same 50 million API calls.
Reddit assured us that the pricing would be reasonable and rooted in reality, yet it surpasses even the infamous Twitter pricing debacle, where 50 million tweets cost a staggering $42,000. In comparison, Imgur, a platform similar to Reddit in terms of user base and media, charges me a mere $166 for the same volume of API calls.
Selig does some ballpark math and estimates that Reddit currently generates about $0.12 in revenue per month per active user. The average Apollo user would cost $2.50 per month in API fees — 20× higher.
Right now Apollo is free to use, but offers a Pro tier with a slew of additional features and fun stuff for a one-time payment of $5, and an Ultra tier with even more for a $13/year subscription. If Reddit goes through with this API pricing, Apollo’s free and Pro tiers would be unsustainable, and the Ultra subscription would have to cost at least $50 or $60 per year.