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The Narwhal for Reddit app has finalized its prices after researching user opinions. The developer says the idea of tiered subscriptions will be abandoned and the app will instead have a single plan for $3.99 per month.
This is the same as Now for Reddit, which considers multiple tiers, but the Android app Relay has pay-as-you-go pricing…
background
The turmoil began in May, when it was revealed that Reddit was demanding $20 million a year for access to APIs used by popular third-party apps such as Apollo. The developer revealed that the app had to be terminated as a result.
What started out as a well-planned protest by a few dozen of the largest subreddits ended up with more than 8,000 subreddits being shut down for at least 48 hours.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has made it clear that he doesn’t care about the opinions of Reddit users and has begun firing moderators of protesting subreddits while threatening other users. Users fired back with one-star reviews of the official app, claiming that the banned mods were enabled by alternative mods to post dangerous advice.
Narwhal on Reddit app
Developer Rick Harrison initially appeared to have some kind of deal with Huffman, but now he’s in the same position as everyone else and has to charge users a subscription to pay for API calls. It doesn’t have to be.
A usage-based model was one option considered, but users rejected it due to its opacity. How can I estimate the number of API calls my app will make?
Narwhal will start with a single subscription plan of $3.99 per month. You don’t have to worry about what API calls you’re making, let alone what the API is. For less than the price of Reddit Premium, everyone can get Narwhal, ad-free and privacy-focused. I will continue to improve it over time.
Harrison says the goal is just to cover costs.
Reddit currently charges a large fee for the use of its API to power Narwhal. This fee can be in the tens if not hundreds of thousands per month, depending on the number of subscribers. The sole purpose of this subscription is to cover the cost of using the API.
The Verge The developer said it was initially considering tiers ranging from $2.99 to $11.99 per month, and says Relay for Reddit on Android takes a complex tiered approach.
Relay will automatically take you to a page where you can choose one of six different price points (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, or Ruby) to be billed monthly. […]
For example, if you choose the Bronze plan, you are limited to 1,350 API calls per month. This equates to an average of 45 calls per day, or about 30 minutes of Redditing per day.
Some users aren’t happy, with some saying it feels like a return to the days of the early Internet’s AOL minutes.
what is your view? Do you prefer flat fees or tiered pricing? Or have you abandoned third-party apps altogether? Let us know in the comments.
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