I'm a Relay user on Android, and the creator of Relay has said he may need to charge $3/mo for the app (previously was a buy-once for $2). It's useful enough for me to pay that much, and Reddit has every incentive and right to charge for API access. I think they did the community a disservice with the tight timeline and how they communicated the change, but I can survive $3/mo to pay for a service that I have enjoyed for well over a decade now.
I feel for moderators who have had to deal with crappy tools for so long and have had to rely on the API to get things done. I do question what Reddit has done with the VC money and the dev time they have put in. Their app is undeniably worse than the 3rd party alternatives, and the lack of decent mod tools that required the use of bots is something they should have sorted out YEARS ago. The lack of accessibility from their own app is also very questionable, and their response was to only allow not-for-profit accessibility tools to continue using the API for free. They should have addressed their shortcomings instead of features that have questionable utility, like real-time chat.
I feel for moderators who have had to deal with crappy tools for so long and have had to rely on the API to get things done. I do question what Reddit has done with the VC money and the dev time they have put in. Their app is undeniably worse than the 3rd party alternatives, and the lack of decent mod tools that required the use of bots is something they should have sorted out YEARS ago. The lack of accessibility from their own app is also very questionable, and their response was to only allow not-for-profit accessibility tools to continue using the API for free. They should have addressed their shortcomings instead of features that have questionable utility, like real-time chat.