One surviving Reddit app plans to charge based on how much you use it

One surviving Reddit app plans to charge based on how much you use it

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The developer Relay for Reddit, of one of the remaining third-party Reddit apps for Android, detailed the potential prices for planned subscriptions for the app in a new post on Thursday. The costs of a subscription will go up based on a user’s daily average number of API calls, essentially meaning that the more things a person does in the app, the more they might have to pay.

In July, Reddit officially transitioned from a free to a paid API, meaning that developers would have to pay the company for accessing Reddit’s data for their apps. The change forced many popular apps to shut down, but a handful of developers, including the one who makes Relay for Reddit, said they might be able to continue making their apps if they charged a monthly fee.

The proposed subscription prices for Relay are between $1 and $5 per month. Here is the full list, from developer DBrady’s post, which appears to include Google’s take of the subscription and Relay’s expected revenues:

$1 - average 45 calls per day, covers ~45% of users (Google: $.15 / minimum of $.52 to Relay)

$2 - average 100 API calls per day, covers ~80% of users (Google: $.30 / minimum of $.97 to Relay)

$3 - average 200 API calls per day, covers ~95% of users (Google: $.45 / minimum of $1.09 to Relay)

$5 - unlimited API calls per day, covers ~99.8% of users profitably (i will likely carry a small loss on the remaining .2% of users but that should be negligible if enough users sign up).

In the newest release of Relay, DBrady says they also added the ability for users to see their average daily API calls. DBrady is encouraging people to share their usage stats and weigh in on the potential prices. DBrady added that the app will remain free “for the next few weeks,” so if you don’t want to pay to use the app, you’ll have a little bit of time until you’re required to.

Last week, the developer of Now for Reddit also gave an update on their plans for a future subscription. The plan is for a subscription to roll out in two or three weeks from the time of their post and they expect to charge a monthly cost of $3 or $4. “This won’t cover the cost of ‘super users’ who use the app all day, but, on average, it should allow me to pay the Reddit API bill,” the developer said.

Many subreddits and users protested against the switch to the paid API in-party because of its effect on the third-party app ecosystem. More than 8,000 subreddits went dark at the peak of the protests in mid-June, but at this point, only a few under 1,800 are still private or restricted, according to the Reddark tracker, and the vast majority of the biggest subreddits are operating as normal. Users also took out their frustrations at Reddit and CEO Steve Huffman on the collaborative r/Place canvas.