I don’t think the plan was ever to get revenue by charging for API calls, it was to make the pricing so high that users would be forced to move to the official app where they could track and serve ads to users. Apparently Reddit management is so stupid that they thought this was the best plan and continued gaslighting their users about it. At the very least they could have been honest about it and said it was to try to improve profitability since they can’t serve ads to 3rd party clients. It still would have made people angry but it would have blown over.

The problem was that when interest rates were low it was easy to get funding from investors for your business without much care for getting a return on it. Gaining users and revenue was more important than profit. Now investors are calling it in since their costs have increased and companies are scrambling to do anything to prove that their business isn’t just a house of cards being held up by a foundation of venture capital money.

It sucks as a customer/user of any of these services since they could have built a sustainable business from the outset, maybe with slower growth, but instead everyone pays the price at the end of the day when the product turns to shit.