> Complaining you don't get free stuff anymore is really unbecoming of an entrepreneur.

He wasn't complaining about that. He was led to believe that the price would be reasonable, and he was willing to pay a reasonable price, as he already pays Imgur.

How does the Apollo maintainer get to decide what's a reasonable price? It certainly can't be through hand-wavy and supposedly "generous" estimations of how much money Reddit makes.

Only Reddit knows how much money it loses per user who doesn't see ads.

> How does the Apollo maintainer get to decide what's a reasonable price?

Prices are a two-way street. You can name any price you like, but if buyers can't afford it, then you make $0.

This is why the developer himself can't just raise his own prices by any arbitrary amount. Buyers have some say in the price.

> This is why the developer himself can't just raise his own prices by any arbitrary amount. Buyers have some say in the price.

Indeed, but this is the risk in selling a middleware product. The Apollo developer doesn't own the platform, and was lucky he hadn't yet been asked to pay for the share of maintenance costs his app created.

Imgur does not generate content and interest on the same level of Reddit/Twitter, etc. It would not be reasonable to assume similar API pricing.

It seems the OP has a very distorted impression of what "reasonable" means to another for-profit company.