u/heyjoshturner

Haha yeah, they didn’t really communicate when “July 1” officially started for them, which is less of a clear cut thing than you might imagine, so I went with UTC to be safe.

Like Amanda (Alerts for Reddit dev, /u/notifications_app) pointed out, there are definitely ways to continue shipping a version of the product to users. For me, with the current user base size of Pager and the number of subreddits being monitored, I doubt I could get it under the free limit. However, if I moved away from full-subreddit scans to only scanning for new content and a few other frankly ingenious strategies Amanda shared, I could probably get something together and working without breaking the bank too badly.

But doing that would require rolling back some features I'm really proud of, and it would reduce the scan interval from ~1 minute to 5-10 minutes. It would also require me to add some form of monetization, likely a subscription cost, to the application and further limit the number of monitors active at any given time.

It's death by a thousand cuts; I don't want to roll back features that I know a large number of Pager users rely on, I don't want to change my long-time stance on monetization, and I don't want to widen the notification interval beyond where it previously sat.

I am thrilled Amanda was able to come up with a way to keep her app active, and I can't tell you how appreciative I am that she reached out to share her ideas with me, the developer of a competing product.

Bit of an outage

It’s just far too high for me to continue offering the same service with the same speed and coverage.

Not to my knowledge

Have you considered adding a donation button?

I've spoken about this in the past but since Pager was always a side project to which I could donate very little time I never felt right about accepting donations.

I don't see cause to change that position now at the end. I do genuinely appreciate the offer though, it means a lot.

As much as I love Apollo, Pager has been the ultimate app

You hear that Selig, you scrub?

Nope - asked and confirmed with the admins. I'd only have access to 100 requests per minute per client id for free, rather than the current 60 requests per minute per user we have access to now.

It would cost me millions per year to keep up the level of functionality Pager delivers.

And it’s free! At least for now.

At the end of the month I’m going to start charging 50k per month to use it.

Should be no issue at all - outside of url schemes Pager doesn’t really have any knowledge or interaction with Apollo.

This isn’t even true - my app, Pager, which is used by hundreds of mods (but also available for everyone) is completely free with no monetization whatsoever - and I have been explicitly told that despite this I am still on the hook for the full price which would be approx. 7mil annually.

These changes are designed to do a singular thing - kill 3rd party apps without explicitly saying they’re doing so.

Okay, so you're still killing 3rd party apps.

Creating a client id requires creating an app and that isn't possible via the API and would be quickly shut down if tried via scraping. Not to mention it would require the username/password of users which they shouldn't be willing to hand over

The Reddit Data API is free to use within the published rate limits and subject to our Developer Terms and Data API Terms.

I'm the developer of Pager - I don't charge for it, it is non-commercial, I have plenty of mods who use it but also non-mods.

Are you still changing the current rate limit of 60 requests per minute per user to 100 requests per minute per client id?

The current API cost is free for all 3rd party developers - that is changing at the end of June

Due to the nature of Pager it is very API heavy despite a much smaller userbase compared to /u/iamthatis's Apollo.

Because of this, our monthly cost would be around $600k and our annual cost around $7.3 million.

It's just impossible for any 3rd party application to succeed under these conditions - which is exactly what they're aiming to achieve.

Top 10 3P apps usage over rate limits

Can you include the app names? I'd love to know if Pager at least made the list before you kneecapped it

It entirely depends on where the price point lands. Reddit in their infinite wisdom, announced they were going to be charging for the API over a month ago with notice it was going into effect in 2 months without giving price information.

So - I honestly have no idea. I'm exploring monetization options, but I honestly don't love the idea of monetizing Pager.

We'll see - but I'll make an announcement on the sub when I have more info to go on.

I really don't see that happening - mainly because the bulk of what drives Pager's functionality isn't the iOS app but rather the server infrastructure, which is considerably more difficult to both spin up and maintain via open source.

I'd also add that right now, we are in a bit of a holding pattern with changes to the Reddit API that could very well make Pager incredibly costly to continue to operate. I hope to have more information about this in the coming week, but the future is murky at best right now for all apps using the Reddit API.

Not just you - but nothing currently in the beta that isn't also live on the app store version, so I would just jump over there. I'll post here once we deploy new beta changes, but right now the focus in the API changes coming from Reddit.

It doesn't look good 😬

/u/KeyserSosa I have similar concerns with my app Pager - really disappointing to see these changes announced with so little concrete details for developers to work with

I was able to get it to work by pressing repeatedly but you're right - it is very finicky and something I'll need to address this week