No matter how you look at this Spez fucked up.

The protest is hurting ad dollars, some amount of users have migrated away and Reddit has received a ton of negative press.

Spez admits that the top two API users are no longer going to be selling their product. He doesn’t speak about this like he regrets it. If he were serious about selling API access, he literally lost his two largest customers by refusing to work with them and slandering them.

Apollo said that they quoted him $20M/yr and he said in further interviews that the reason he couldn’t make it work is because he sold the app to people for up to a year license and the cost he sold them to would be too low to cover his costs. If Reddit was willing to work with him on timeframe or costs he could have implemented a solution that would have let the users pay the fee (like $2/mo) and enough profit for him to continue working. Instead Spez provided no flexibility on price or timeline. He torpedoed his largest customer costing Reddit upwards of $20M/yr in revenue. The same with RIF.

Reddit is getting $0/mo from them when they were not unwilling to work with Reddit on the pricing. They just needed flexibility that Spez wouldn’t provide.

He fucked this up royally.