I’ve always been a fan of public APIs. I’m kinda a data junky. Data has meaning and can be given new meaning, be given context, be expanded into something else. Data can be powerful. It can also have a price. Reddit and Twitter recently put a price on theirs and it’s more than most can pay. It was a reaction. I don’t follow their financials, but I doubt that price is to provide the data, it’s all about restricting the data into their context. It’s not that they don’t want people to have access to it, they just don’t want it accessed outside of their medium. They want the ad revenue. They want to use your data, given to them by their app using their API.

It’s always been my goal to have a free API for smaller use cases, if I ever launch my service. I may be able to do that still, but I’m seeing now how providing something for free can actually hurt the consumer, if I can’t always provide it for free. I’m sure Reddit was absorbing some cost by providing it for free. I’m also pretty sure the people using the apps probably wouldn’t have used Reddit without those apps. They used them for a reason. I think this is a wrinkle Reddit may have underestimated. I also think it was considered though, and the risk of losing a few hundred thousand users now, may not matter if new users come along.

The issue I see is Reddit users aren’t typical users; they are passionate and they don’t tend to use other social media sites as much as other users. They use Reddit and that’s about it. The recent API changes and the talks of subreddit blackouts, even some going entirely dark forever, it’s not going to be painless. It may not be as painful as people make it out to be either, it’s hard to tell if people will actually quit. It’ll come down to loyalty and a lot of times that loyalty will side with the provider, not the 3rd parties.

What I’m considering is to to have a free rate limit, maybe 100,000 requests per month. Anything above that will have a price, even if it’s significantly less than what Reddit or Twitter are asking. I think that is the fair approach, to just come out of the gate with a fair pricing system, that also provides a free tier. That way if someone is using the API, they can calculate costs and offset them, without just getting free ripped away from them. 100,000 requests are probably enough for this blog to be in the free tier, if not I’d probably adjust it up to a reasonable level, as I get hardly any traffic.

I honestly hadn’t thought about rates or limits before this Reddit fiasco, so I’m not even sure yet what is fair. My opinion is most individuals should be able to fall in the free tier and sites or apps that have more active users or publishers may fall into a reasonable per user tier, like $0.10 per user, maybe with a minimum, like $1.00/month. The Apollo app that is getting all of the attention, because Reddit is effectively shutting it down, claims it would cost $2,000,000 to run the app, with Reddit’s new API pricing. They have 50,000 users, with an estimated $500,000 annual revenue, so $5,000/month in API expense is a massive difference compared to $2 Million. This is all speculation, on my part, I’m not announcing a pricing plan at this time.

My belief is fair use and fair pricing. That’s what I would expect and what I think an API consumer would likely expect. I think the Internet is a form of empowerment to the people. Everyone should be able to have a free medium to publish on, within reason, or an inexpensive one if it’s consumed more than typical. I’m trying to not make the same mistakes I’m seeing, but I also have entirely different goals than Twitter or Reddit. I want my users to be my shareholders, not someone worried about profiting from selling their data.