I’m not sure even short term thinking makes sense here. Dbrady had to remove ads in order to get access to the API. That means no income for him until he gets the subscription up and running. I assume he worked out a deal with Reddit where he’s not incurring API charges in the meantime, provided he gets the subscription version of the app up and running by some definitive date. If not, if he’s eating those API charges just with delayed billing, and hoping he can convert enough subscriptions to backfill it, whoa boy that sounds like a risky bet. In either case, he is going to spend the next few weeks working to optimize API calls and figure out the different subscription tiers and get that all set up. That sounds like a lot of work when he’s getting no (or potentially negative) income.

I don’t know, unless Dbrady is just so emotionally invested in his app that he can’t let it go, or he is financially reliant on it and doesn’t think there are any viable alternatives for himself in the short/medium term, it just doesn’t make sense to me. It just seems like an enormous risk hoping a subscription model is going to pan out, not even mentioning putting all your chips into the basket of Reddit acting in good faith moving forward, despite all the evidence to the contrary.