Let’s be honest, this price change was all about being able to charge the big corps mega money for access to their data in order to train new generations of AI. The price is absurd, yes, but the owners of reddit know that Google and Microsoft have deep pockets (among other global corps wanting the massive amount of data reddit has saved).
They never expected the third party apps to be able to pay this much and frankly, they don’t care. It’s HUGE profit from AI corps, and the losses, at least short term, will be overshadowed by the gains. Long term? I don’t know, this isn’t my area of expertise, but, like I did with Twitter, I have moved on so at this point, it’s no longer relevant to me.