One of the remaining 3rd party Reddit apps (Relay) has begun discussing what it would be charging for subscription fees. Imo, they actually seem somewhat reasonable. The weird thing is that every upvote or downvote is an API call so you can rack up a huge number of API calls from voting.
Also, while the costs might be reasonable now, there’s nothing preventing Reddit from jacking up prices again.
Edit: Also, there wouldn’t be any NSFW content with the app.
This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.
So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.
The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.
So yeah, they’ve managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been: