Hell, I would even dare say, the best way to do it is to have the API be free up to a certain usage, at which point it becomes paid. Then the price scales down as you get even more and more usage.

This allows newcomers to the app space to get their footing, and punishes people trying to automate vote bots while rewarding established devs.

Yes I know, it was just pretty funny that the first comment I saw was about a paid 3rd party app not paying for access, when this was one of reddit's "official" reasons for the changes.

Exactly, this is something I see people not talk about as much. Charging for API access is not new and actually reasonable. Handling API calls costs money after all. The issue was the intentionally ridiculous price.

a reasonable price that's not foisted without notice? who makes such reasoned business decisions?

"because twitter did it" Spez's stupid ass thought he should follow suit. idiot's dumber than a bag of hammers.