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Just realized the lie about reddit api pricing
(kbin.social)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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This is actually a big thing I learned when going to school for accounting. Any business that isn't growing is considered stagnant and will fail without new customers. So the two options are:
a) change your business somehow to bring in new customers. This can be difficult unless you're a first mover. If the market is saturated with competitors, you'll have to steal clients.
b) move into a new vertical and offer a completely different service. That's what reddit is doing. Since they're a fist mover in the API market with existing brand recognition, they're trying to control the baseline cost for the product.
The concept of eternal growth is actually a contributor to why we have recessions. Businesses grow to the point that they either have to charge crazy prices or commit fraud to keep up with market expectations - too much pressure to preform in the stock market. Then the bubble pops and companies cut their biggest cost (labor) to try and stay afloat.
In fact, accounting is quite relevant here. All that needs to happen is for reddit to act like a car dealership and offer a 30 year loan to the app developers for the first year. Deadlines don't even need to change, but apps like Apollo can run as they are for another year with the reddit loan (perhaps minus the free users), giving time to update the annual billing to the higher prices necessary for the apps to survive. And of course they'd have over a year to implement any changes, which hopefully would be enough. $20million over 30 years, even after accounting for interest that's probably less than $1million. So charge users a price that nets $21million a year and the apps can all survive.
Apps would survive and reddit would get a huge cash influsion from all the new revenue generated. Sellig was also willing to talk about allowing reddit ads on Apollo, which would be even more money for reddit.
Why not do this, and get the max money, instead of picking the options that kill the apps and screw over the mods and regular users?