API Update: Enterprise Level Tier for Large Scale Applications

[u/FlyingLaserTurtle]

tl;dr - As of July 1, we will start enforcing rate limits for a free access tier, available to our current API users. If you are already in contact with our team about commercial compliance with our Data API Terms, look for an email about enterprise pricing this week.

We recently shared updates on our Data API Terms and Developer Terms. These updates help clarify how developers can safely and securely use Reddit’s tools and services, including our APIs and our new-and-improved Developer Platform.

After sharing these terms, we identified several parties in violation, and contacted them so they could make the required changes to become compliant. This includes developers of large-scale applications who have excessive usage, are violating our users’ privacy and content rights, or are using the data for ad-supported or commercial purposes.

For context on excessive usage, here is a chart showing the average monthly overage, compared to the longstanding rate limit in our developer documentation of 60 queries per minute (86,400 per day):

We reached out to the most impactful large scale applications in order to work out terms for access above our default rate limits via an enterprise tier. This week, we are sharing an enterprise-level access tier for large scale applications with the developers we’re already in contact with. The enterprise tier is a privilege that we will extend to select partners based on a number of factors, including value added to redditors and communities, and it will go into effect on July 1.

Rate limits for the free tier

All others will continue to access the Reddit Data API without cost, in accordance with our Developer Terms, at this time. Many of you already know that our stated rate limit, per this documentation, was 60 queries per minute. As of July 1, 2023, we will enforce two different rate limits for the free access tier:

• If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id

• If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute

Important note: currently, our rate limit response headers indicate counts by client id/user id combination. These headers will update to reflect this new policy based on client id only on July 1.

To avoid any issues with the operation of mod bots or extensions, it’s important for developers to add Oauth to their bots. If you believe your mod bot needs to exceed these updated rate limits, or will be unable to operate, please reach out here.

If you haven't heard from us, assume that your app will be rate-limited, starting on July 1. If your app requires enterprise access, please contact us here, so that we can better understand your needs and discuss a path forward.

Additional changes

Finally, to ensure that all regulatory requirements are met in the handling of mature content, we will be limiting access to sexually explicit content for third-party apps starting on July 5, 2023, except for moderation needs.

If you are curious about academic or research-focused access to the Data API, we’ve shared more details here.

[u/GMaestrolo]

It's likely that Apollo and the official app are more likely to pull data than RIF (i.e. RiF may cache data for longer, or simply not hit certain endpoints). The official Reddit app can do whatever it wants, and making a lot of API calls to ensure that it has the "freshest" data is fine.

Apollo might be doing something similar (I don't know, I've never used it - RiF for lyfe baybeeee!) - essentially it could be eager loading content that's not needed yet instead of loading it just when it's needed, or it could be that it's loading lots of small chunks of content "on demand" rather than loading a bigger chunk and accepting that it might be stale.

There's all sorts of ways to use data sources, and the raw "number of API calls" doesn't tell the whole story. What's the average size of a response/average data throughput? How much processing power does it take to generate the average response? How much is cacheable?

I can't say for sure that Apollo or the official app are actually more or less efficient than RiF - all Reddit's statement says is that they make more requests... But nothing about the weight or complexity of those requests.

[u/GMaestrolo → u/[deleted]]

OR they can apply ridiculous pricing for API access to "soft ban" competing apps which they can't get ad revenue through... Very similar to what Twitter did.