Relay was (yup) one of the third party apps that survived the API-calypse. But this sort of model is unsustainable in the long run, given that the competitor (the broken native app) is free and unlimited.
The obvious future monopoly of the broken native app is bad for the platform in the long run, given that Reddit always sucked off ideas from third party apps; and now there’s no incentive whatsoever to make it better, after Reddit Inc. killed the better competitors.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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:
In the newest release of Relay, DBrady says they also added the ability for users to see their average daily API calls.
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.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!