And I’m fine with them wanting to do that.
The protest was less about them wanting to charge a price, it’s that in a time frame of 6 months reportedly went from “the API won’t have changes anytime soon” to “we’re going to pivot to a paid API soon” to “we’re charging you advertiser rates per x million API requests, starting in a month, and you cannot supplement with your own ads”.
There was no time for these apps to adjust their pricing models. Most were on yearly subscription models or ad-driven. Having that large a pivot in the rules with no time to adapt the business model is just shitty partnership on Reddit’s part.
There’s an open need - and a winner isn’t really determined yet. Let’s see how it plays out. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯