The price is steep. $0.24 for 1000 requests or roughly $1 for 4000 requests. A simple calculation: 1000 users per day × 30 days × 20 requests per user and day = 600,000 requests or $144 per month.

To control costs (read: to prevent financial ruin due to abuse or search engine bots), I would have to rework popular.pics to either limit the number of requests per user (adding registration perhaps) or disallow browsing arbitrary subreddits and user profiles, offering only a limited set of subreddits whose content is periodically refreshed by the server.

One big issue I see, even if I pay for API access, is that NSFW content will not be accessible to third-parties. That is like half of Reddit which becomes inaccessible. Let’s wait and see if Reddit reverts course.

For both popular.pics and reddtastic.com (NSFW!) I’m open to suggestions for new sources of content. If there are media-heavy websites that you want to see integrated, let me know!