Comment by ambicapter
2 years ago
Much, much less than what they were asking for. The top reddit app was being faced with a yearly bill in the tens of millions of dollars, and comparison to other social media website APIs saw a price discrepancy of 20x iirc.
The other social media API is Imgur.
Pricing for Imgur is: $500 for 7.5m requests then $0.01 per request after that. Then $10,000 for 150m requests and $0.01 per request after that.
Reddit is at $0.24 per 1,000. Or $0.00024 per request.
Imgur is cheaper for 150m requests but Reddit is cheaper for 500m requests.
So really, what is a reasonable pricing?
Is this a like with like comparison?
Is delivering an image of comparable cost to delivering text via an api?
I have zero experience in this area so could learn something.
It of. Usage wise it's a fair compassion. Both apps would get the same usage levels and type.
Both sites serve - image, video, and text(comments or posts).
Imgur would almost certainly be cheaper to run due to the simpler nature of the site. Imgur would just need checking the overall site for content.
Reddit would be checking each of the subreddits for content and aggerating it. Which would be more complex and more expensive to run.
Realistically, it's the best comparision there is.
2 replies →
Surely you see a difference between serving pictures and serving text.
APIs I am familiar with differ, primarily, on the size of the data and additional features (formats supported, timeliness, etc).
Reddit asked ~2M$ per month. In his rant Apollo creator told that he‘ll be ok paying half of that. Can you imagine how much is he making on free Reddit APIs?
Can you imagine how much engagement the platform gets as a result of his work?
Just saying, it's never fair to try and say any one party in this arrangement is just leeching off another.
Reddit provides a platform, Users provide the community, and third-party app developers make interaction between the other two easier. Third-party apps aren't even able to engage with certain reddit content because the API never exposed it, but people still choose them; That says a lot about how they feel about the official app, and the real value that third-party devs provide.
What's crazy to me is that Reddit could have easily achieved their goals by just investing in developing a really good native app that people want to use, thereby monetizing them while also building goodwill! This whole thing could be achieved and make them look -better-. But they are making stupid short-term decisions to be able to IPO and they chose the stick over the carrot.