The Narwhal for Reddit app now has confirmed pricing, after surveying the views of users. The developer says that thoughts of tiered subscriptions have been abandoned, and that the app will instead have a single plan costing $3.99 per month.
This is the same as Now for Reddit, which also considered multiple tiers – while Android app Relay is going with usage-based pricing …
Background
The mess started back in May, when it was revealed that Reddit would be demanding $20M a year for access to the API used by popular third-party app Apollo and others. The developer revealed that the app would have to close as a result.
A planned protest by what was initially a few dozen of the biggest subreddits eventually turned into more than 8,000 subreddits going dark for at least 48 hours.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman made it clear that he wasn’t interested in the views of Reddit users and started firing the moderators of protesting subreddits while threatening others. Users hit back with 1-star reviews of the official app, and ousted mods said that replacement mods were allowing dangerous advice to be posted.
Narwhal for Reddit app
Developer Rick Harrison initially appeared to have done some kind of deal with Huffman, but is now in the same place as everyone else: Having to charge users a subscription in order to pay for API calls.
A usage-based model was one of the options considered, but users rejected it, in part because of its opacity – how could they estimate the number of API calls their app usage would involve?
Narwhal is going to start out with a single subscription plan for $3.99/month. No one has to even think about what an API is let alone what API calls they are making. For less than the price of Reddit Premium, everyone will get an ad-free, privacy-focused Narwhal that I will continuously improve over time.
Harrison says that he is only aiming to cover costs.
Reddit is now charging a substantial fee to use the API to power Narwhal. This fee will be tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands a month depending on how many people subscribe. The only goal of this subscription is to cover the costs of using the API.
The Verge says that the developer originally considered tiers ranging from $2.99 to $11.99 per month, and notes that Relay for Reddit on Android has taken a complex tiered approach.
Relay will automatically direct you to a page where you can choose one of six different price points to be charged monthly: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, or Ruby […]
For example, if you select the Bronze plan, then you are capped at 1350 API calls per month which is an average of 45 calls per day or typically around 30 minutes of redditing per day.
Some users aren’t happy, one saying it’s like returning to the days of AOL minutes on the early Internet.
What’s your view? Do you favor a flat fee or tiered pricing? Or have you abandoned third-party apps altogether? Please let us know in the comments.
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