Hey guys! I've been loosely following what's been happening with the Reddit API changes. There's a few things I'm not fully understanding; I was hoping someone on here could help me out.

Disclaimer: I'm a software developer but have never interacted with the Reddit Data API.

From what I understand, Reddit is essentially going to start charging API users for access. I was reading these comments from the latest AMA with /u/spez:

Effective July 1, 2023, the rate limits to use the Data API free of charge are:

100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication and 10 queries per minute if you are not using OAuth authentication.

and:

Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app).

Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect.

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Just from these comments, it sounds to me like it would be possible to have an app that uses the user's own OAuth to call the API.

100 requests per minute sounds very reasonable. And then I started thinking, how else are these apps working today?

I saw that the Apollo developer made a GH repo available with the code for his app's backend. But, why does an app that is just a frontend for the Reddit API need to interface with its own backend? Do all of these 3rd-party apps have their own backend server that calls the Reddit API? What's the point of doing that?

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Am I misunderstanding the free API tier and how a 3rd-party app could use it? Is there a reason why these apps need to use their own API key and not the end-users'?

I feel like I am definitely missing something here.