API Update: Enterprise Level Tier for Large Scale Applications

Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient.

Do they publically accuse you of being inefficient?

You're the one making the claim that there are improvements available for Apollo. The idea that iamthatis needs to back up your argument for you shows no good faith at all; how is anyone supposed to read staffs' comments on Apollo as being anything but a hatchet job?

Family thoughts night gentle learning the simple where.

[deleted]

If the app can operate with half the daily request volume, can it operate with fewer?

Do you not realize it's going to operate at zero and your users aren't going to stick around?

Are you guys almost done with this what about strategy and company protection and think of your god damn users that generate every single drop of content except for the ads?

[deleted]

[deleted]

Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient.

This you?

We don’t yet provide scaled reporting on API usage, though we are working on a solution for large scale apps that may be scaled more broadly in the future. Note that bots are able to track their own outbound API requests using standard logging and analytics.

On March 14th, Apollo made nearly 1 billion requests against our API in a single day, triggered in part by our system outage.

Ok, so you would agree then that the unexpectedly high number of API requests objectively do not matter because they would not be charged/would be credited (the API was not meeting SLA)?

[deleted]

Can we see how that compares to your official app? And making this about “efficiency” is absurdly disingenuous and distracts from the actual issue of pricing, and you know it.

After the outage, Apollo started making 53% fewer calls per day. If the app can operate with half the daily request volume, can it operate with fewer?

This is like saying “because you can eat half as much and stay alive, you can always eat even less and be fine”. Can’t you see how ridiculous that is?

In addition, please correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to be dancing around the elephant in the room, which is comparing raw userbase size. If you can’t see how that might correlate with number of API requests, then Reddit has some even bigger sources of ineptitude to deal with than the people who decided this pricing was a good idea.

Yes, the point you are making to justify enacting a cost for API access is completely reasonable. It is perfectly understandable for Reddit to want to make money off of third-party apps, since their users are not bringing in any ad revenue. What’s not reasonable, however, is the pricing. We don’t give a shit if you charge a reasonable price, but this is not at all reasonable.

Should probably let your Product Owners know that you do not have the support mechanisms in place similar to Amazon and google to support users of your API.

Those companies do provide services to help customers inspect and repair API usage patterns.

The timeline for this transition for developers seems too aggressive.

I’m guessing that Reddit’s own app likely performs worse than Apollo, otherwise you would probably be bragging about it and using it as a “gold standard”.

I’ll also guess we get to wait a few days for legal to review another response that will be disputed, disproved, and lampooned by the community.

You are either lying or just really bad at your job:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/well-architected/cost/

https://pages.awscloud.com/rs/112-TZM-766/images/ebook-aws-cloud-financial-management-guide-032023.pdf

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/cost-management/best-practices-for-optimizing-your-cloud-costs

Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient. It’s up to us as users of these services to optimize our usage to meet our budget.

This is a useless comparison; Just because other platforms don't give devs/users a heads up doesn't mean reddit has to.

Even in that case - Google and Amazon 100% DO work with large partners who generate them lots of revenue.

Reddit takes some of the blame here for allowing that level of inefficient usage, which is why we haven’t spotlighted it to date, but I think it is a good reminder that inefficiencies do exist.

It also highlights the importance of having a system in place that shares the responsibility of managing this with developers.

vs

Having developers ask this question of themselves is the main point of having a cost associated with access in the first place

So your solution here, for a "systemic" approach is just cost, with all other burdens put on the developer?

I hope this is just how things are playing out in public - But this comes across as super unhelpful. From what I have seen and read, /u/iamthatis has been fairly reasonable so far in asking nicely where the issues are, and has done some work to look at his application vs the official one.

I'm not sure if you meant to bring this comparison down, but saying Apollo is inefficient means you've now set the official application has the standard by which to judge API usage.

And further, I'd add the drama and news cycle on this isn't any developers fault - The current pricing appears unsustainable for them, they had to give their users a heads up.

And I say their users because a large portion of those users Don't use the reddit desktop site or the official application for good reason.

With all this talk about inefficiencies, the "new" reddit desktop website would be a great place to start.

Why don't you answer his question about the official app?

Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient.

I have less experience with gcp and aws, but Microsoft (and other providers we use) absolutely DO work with us to make us more efficient. At the scale you use these services, NOT having those conversations is negligent.

Perhaps if you were having those conversations yourself you wouldn’t need to pass that cost down to your customers.

Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient.

AWS has a Cost Explorer service , several articles on how to reduce costs, and support tiers that include working with Amazon on usage guidance.

If you're going to offer enterprise cost tiering it is very reasonable to expect enterprise level support.

Ok, let’s assume for a second that Apollo is inefficient and that they could reduce their API calls to the same level as RIF.

Then what? RIF’s dev said they will have to discontinue their app too. So did basically every other dev that maintains any major Reddit client.

Your current API pricing is ridiculous, the only thing that comes close to it is Elon’s Twitter, which is famous for being prohibitively and stupidly expensive.

Again, if you want to get rid of 3rd party apps, be upfront about it. But don’t give us this nonsense.

there is no way the person answering this is a product person who has any competence. this is like a technical project manager (no offense) communicating this shit.

Does Reddit ask the people least prepared to give substantive answers to address questions like this? Because your responses are disingenuous and not based in actual facts.

Edit: not that this matters to you, but I must tell you that your comment still bothers me a day later because of its complete dishonesty and contempt for your users and for the people who developed the apps that brought people to your site. It’s really, really gross.

Having developers ask this question of themselves is the main point of having a cost associated with access in the first place. How might your app be more efficient? Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient. It’s up to us as users of these services to optimize our usage to meet our budget.

The admins should talk to each other:

Our intent is not to shut down third-party apps. Our pricing is specifically based on usage levels that we measure to be as equitable as possible. We’re happy to work with third-party apps to help them improve efficiency, which can significantly impact overall cost.

Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient.

this is just a flat out lie and blatantly wrong. Almost every provider will offer such services to their enterprise-level customers (and even their not-quite enterprise customers), so the fact that you're blindly doubling down on this take while ignoring the fact here about how Apollo is actually more efficient than your garbage official app, truly speaks volumes.

Please talk to your manager and have an engineer reply. This is embarrassing.

Imagine being a Reddit admin and getting called out by an ex-Amazon employee on Reddit about false statements about Amazon.

Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient. It’s up to us as users of these services to optimize our usage to meet our budget.

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Greedy little pigboy ruins reddit thinking reddit users are same as twitter users.

Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient.

I guarantee you this is not true. AWS will provide enterprise customers like Reddit with all sorts of tips on how to optimize their usage of their platform and cut unnecessary costs.

You want Apollo to be an "enterprise" customer but don't seem to have any interest in offering an "enterprise" product.

Having developers ask this question of themselves is the main point of having a cost associated with access in the first place. How might your app be more efficient? Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient. It’s up to us as users of these services to optimize our usage to meet our budget.

I work for (but do not represent!) a major octocat-obsessed software collaboration platform as a senior engineer - whose views and opinions in this post are his own and not those of his employer - and I find this rather shortsighted. I personally have worked on many support tickets that have to do with helping to optimize end-user API usage, and I know the company has reached out to many consumers of the API and service, large and small, to help them be more efficient in their use of the platform.

Granted, the company I work for doesn't charge for API access or calls, so it's in our best interest to help developers use our resources efficiently; and there aren't ads on the service, so we don't have the monetary pressure of third-party clients not displaying said ads - but much like other developers who work for large organizations who have spoken up, I feel that this statement overlooks how much support and assistance goes into running a mutually beneficial platform.

Google and Amazon quite literally do tell you how to be more efficient, you and the other admins are going beyond being disingenuous to outright lying.

Both AWS and GCP will be more than willing to help you figure out your billing and give you advice based on their own past experience combined with internal tooling specifically made for this exact purpose alongside dedicated engineers and support personnel who's entire job is to help customers tap their API more efficiently.

I know you're lying about this because the company I work for has had to do this very thing before with Azure and I have close friends who work at AWS who are quite familiar with this as they've worked on creating tooling and analytics for this purpose.

Unlike Reddit, Google and Amazon are competently run companies who provide support to their customers. What they don't do is thumb their nose and subtly insult their 3rd parties that do better than them. When that happens, they buy them out or hire the talent.

Reddit on the other hand has barely veiled contempt for its 3rd party developers who have given it the lions share of its mobile user growth and arguably have kept the platform single handedly alive in the transition from desktop browsers to smartphones.

To say nothing of the outright hostility towards users that this all bares open. You seem to be laboring under the delusion that you are innovating or have somehow created something unique in Reddit when you haven't, given that there have been no major changes or worthwhile features rolled out in the decade+ that I've been using this site.

For a company that so desperately wants to be in the same league as FAANG and friends, you lot seem to somehow always choose the wrong thing to copy from the actual innovators in this industry.

What's most confusing about all this is that after a giant golden egg has crashed through your HQ in the form of LLMs and the AI paradigm shift, you decide to thumb the eye of the users? The same users who need I remind you provide the only real value Reddit has now because of its enormous archive of human generated text to train LLMs on.

Would it really have been so difficult to just create a sanely priced API and create different endpoints for AI companies and to leave the existing one as is from a technical standpoint and for 3rd party clients? For a real tech company that would be any other day, but it seems like expecting any actual work to come out of you guys is an exercise in futility.

While inefficiencies exist in all software products, do you guys have any data proving that the same set of actions taken from Apollo vs other sources (the official app, RiF, etc) requires more API calls? Until you start showing that data it just seems like you’re saying a lot of people use Apollo very heavily.

[deleted]

For shame!

Are the Reddit admins completely void of any professionalism that they keep insisting on putting on a clown show?

This entire matter is characterized by a string of duplicitous and disingenuous communications, refusals to answer important questions, poor attempts at divide and conquer tactics, withholding of essential information until the eleventh hour and even straight up lies.

The first fuckup is announcing changes without providing essential information.

The second fuckup was the ridiculous pricing while pretending it’s fair and reasonable.

The subsequent fuckups consist of dragging your customers through the mud, attempting to drive a wedge between your customers, cherry picking parts of comments and leaving important questions unanswered and straight up lying.

You want to talk about how other companies do business?
Then explain why Imgur charges $166 per 50 million calls and why Reddit thinks it’s fair and reasonable to charge almost 100x that?

Or do you insist on limiting yourself to Google and Amazon? In which case, explain to us why you’re lying when everyone who even remotely deals with Google, Amazon and Microsoft for that matter, knows they’ll happily help their customers be more efficient.

Or how about the fact that it shouldn’t even matter what they do, because Reddit has stated on multiple occasions that they’re more than willing to help their customers be more efficient.

Or are you ready to drop the whole “efficiency” pretext, because the developer of your example, rif, has already indicated that they too, will have to close up shop if they’re hit with your ridiculous API pricing?

Apollo’s developer, Christian, has been nothing but gracious about you in public, going out of his way to emphasize how his interactions with Reddit have been nice and respectful, yet you decide to drag him in public and make unsubstantiated claims about inefficiencies and excessiveness.

And every single time he asks for clarification, you either ignore him or you produce non-answers like in your latest comment.

I can only presume this is fueled by some level of panic as a result of the very public pushback and an attempt to make an example out of him, for shame!

Stop dancing around the questions and answer the man!

Clarify what, according to you and Reddit, the inefficiencies are that Apollo is experiencing

Clarify what the benchmark is that Reddit uses to substantiate the claim that Apollo is excessive in its API calls

Clarify how rif is presented as a “good” example in which the pricing works out, when its developer has indicated that the API pricing will make them insolvent

Clarify how Reddit’s own app is generating the same, if not more, API calls as the app you seek to make an example out of

Clarify exactly how many daily API calls per user Reddit deems to be “normal”, and if not immediately apparent, how Reddit suggests to stay within that number

Clarify how that number, if at all, changes based on how actively the app in question is being used by end users

And for good measure:

Clarify, in no uncertain terms, if third party apps will maintain access to NSFW content to be served to end users

Enough with the BS, the weaseling, the lies, the duplicitous nonsense, the non-answers, the whataboutism, the false equivalencies, the cherry picked data on a day you failed to meet anything remotely resembling a reasonable SLA, the thinly veiled blaming in the form of “that’s our fault for letting you get away with it”, the contradictory messaging and all the other stuff that has no business in a professional organization that wants to wear the big boy pants and make it to an IPO.

Grow up, and simply answer the questions that are asked and for the love of all that’s holy, stop dragging your customers through the mud for no other reason than to not have to admit that your pricing is straight up delusional.

What time range is your initial numbers against? What’s the requests per (second/minute/hour) per user per app? The initial numbers gives some data, but it’s hardly a fair comparison. Do RIF users use the App as much or as long?

Having developers ask this question of themselves is the main point of having a cost associated with access in the first place. How might your app be more efficient?

You expect companies to fork over millions of dollars when this is the kind of support they can expect? Are you really that obtuse? I cannot believe you treat your potential customers with such hostility and disdain. Absolutely amateur hour. Your IPO is absolutely doomed if this is the kind of leadership you have. Best of luck with that...

So you're complaining about Apollo and threatening to restrict them and yet, you don't actually tell them the issue... that's a fucking awful response.

Amazon and Google may not tell you, but they also don't threaten to remove your access and kill your app...

Wow! what an asshole response!

Reddit you greedy bastards, your gonna blow your legs off trying to juice honest users just for basic data.

This is how you end up with people just ignoring your API and scraping / abusing your system and not giving you any ads.

API access for public data should be free, get your shit sorted.

Before, i was just mad at the situation. I understand the cold harsh reality that reddit is a business and needs to make money. I honestly felt bad for the folks who had to be the messengers.

But now I'm mad at reddit because this response is just gross.

He's not asking you to fix his app. It has been claimed in another post that reddit sees a material difference between his app and others but reddit will not share what that material difference is.

Reddit made a claim. Reddit should back it up. Y'all have basically just told a potential financial partner to GFY.

This is absolutely a terrible response from someone officially representing reddit. This is shameful. Why would any developer if a more efficient app (assuming that's truly a thing) read this comment and say "yes, I'll pay this company a few million dollars a year and start charging my users a monthly fee to make that sustainable"?

Will y'all not just explicitly state you're killing 3rd party apps already? There is zero evidence of any actual good faith interest in making something that actually could work for both reddit and third party app developers.

What a wild and unprofessional response.

“We’re just gonna charge you $20 million dollars for something that is currently free while also providing no developer assistance. Suck a bag of dicks on the way out”

You could’ve just written that instead

Apollo made nearly 1 billion requests against our API in a single day, triggered in part by our system outage. After the outage, Apollo started making 53% fewer calls per day.

Serious question: why would Apollo’s API usage fall to under half of what it was after a sitewide Reddit outage? I’m not exactly experienced with this, but to me that sounds like a Reddit problem, not an Apollo problem.

Even if you’re right, why do you feel the need to be so unprofessional and disrespectful?

I hope you’re not involved in development, considering all the major cloud providers DO work with developers on these things. The base level Azure certification (designed to be so simple even a sales guy can grasp it) drills into you the dashboards that provide insight and even automated recommendations for efficiencies without even having to consult their support teams.

If you are a developer and you’ve missed such obvious and base level functionality, then maybe you you need to go back and relearn the basics of your field.

Christian has mentioned in the past that Reddit has been helpful whenever he's contacted them. What's changed to make you blast him in a public forum for "inefficiencies" that match the API usage of the official app?

You could have contacted him privately after noticing this discrepancy (if it's even real) between Apollo and other apps, instead bringing it up out of the blue in an announcement post. On the surface this looks like it was targeted at Apollo because Christian was the one to break the news of the API pricing.

On March 14th, Apollo made nearly 1 billion requests against our API in a single day, triggered in part by our system outage. After the outage, Apollo started making 53% fewer calls per day.

Perhaps because users were no longer refreshing to try and load content after the outage? It would have been extremely easy to contact Christian (again, privately) to ask him to implement some backoff to reduce the number of requests for this case. And maybe Reddit could update the status page in a timely manner (instead of 30+ minutes after the fact) so Apollo could use it to reliably indicate to users that Reddit is down?

Having developers ask this question of themselves is the main point of having a cost associated with access in the first place. How might your app be more efficient? Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient. It’s up to us as users of these services to optimize our usage to meet our budget.

Lol I can’t wait until your words are published elsewhere and your boss makes you retract this.

It’s dripping with condescension, wholly inaccurate, and a terrible way to promote Reddit as enterprise level capable right before an IPO.

Bravo!

Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient. It’s up to us as users of these services to optimize our usage to meet our budget.

Google and Amazon support both absolutely tell users — in written documentation and support ticket interactions— how to get the most out of services they provide and limit costs. They also provide service levels (S3 storage tiering, EC2 instance sizing, reserved vs. spot capacity) that allow myriad ways to optimize for cost within the needed services.

Don’t pretend you’re on the same level as those providers; it’s laughable. If you care about your customers and community, you’ll be looking to find a way to offer API access in a way that limits the impact of LLM scraping as well as encourages third-party apps to use the platform effectively. This is not a one-way conversation as you seem to think it is. Not all API calls have the same impact on your infrastructure, or the same value to developers.

You would think a site devoted to encouraging discussion would have exceptional chops at actually discussing things.

Google & Amazon don’t tell us how to be more efficient. It’s up to us as users of these services to optimize our usage to meet our budget.

Do you genuinely think this is how it works? And you’re out here publicly telling devs their code is inefficient? Wild.

Honestly, Reddit takes ALL of the blame for 1) not communicating with developers 2) setting prices that will kill the best third party clients overnight 3) not reaching out when you spot something unusual and help fix it. IF there even is an issue and not just Apollo being used more because it is a more enjoyable experience.

Site-ruining changes should be the last option - if you care about having users. You also fail to take into account people who use more than one third party client and now have to pay subscriptions to multiple developers in order to continue using Reddit. I'm not sure Reddit is worth it based on the proposed APU costs. If anything, you should offer users the option to pay to use third party clients and set the price reasonably. That solves the multiplatform issue at least. The native experience is, after all, an absolute no-go.

You have honestly handled this in the most backwards way imaginable and generated an enormous amount of animosity towards the platform itself. If you want Reddit to wither, go right ahead. Otherwise come down off the high horse and work things out so you don't ruin the site for both your users and your developers.

So basically, you want Apollo to pay $20 million/year but they also have to figure out how they can optimize themselves without official Reddit support? GTFO

“This is our API, we know how it works and it costs money to run, but it’s up to YOU to figure out how to make your calls efficient, that’ll be $12,000 please!”

Lmao.

So I guess we're done with the whole "Reddit has been professional throughout" when communicating with /u/iamthatis huh?