Short answer is “no”.

Long answer require some technical knowledge that you clearly don’t possess and would just give you an headache.

To put it simply, if your app get successful and lots of users adopt it, you are bound to exceed those arbitrary limits.

Thing is, offering free api is not sustainable but you could offer some half way option, like including some ads in the apis responses as well and have the devs agree in showing those ads (I’m talking banners and the like) so that you can assure your ads clients that they are going to be shown anyway even by third party apps.

If course you can then go nuts on the penalties for infringing that agreement.

What is Reddit doing is basically saying, you can use our APIs if you are doing a school project.

I’m not trying to be cynic here but… what do you expect from /r/gaming, a default sub in which the average user is fine with how shitty the gaming industry have become because “companies need to make money” instead of realising that they are being happy to be exploited.

You can filter between local (seeing just the node in which you have the account) and all (seeing all non-blocked nodes in the federation).

you can also vote and comment on other nodes content of course.