Agreed they want to kill alternatives. I just think that done right they could make more money than now by not alienating part of the user base.

They could have easily created pricing tiers which would have skimmed the maximum profit off each. Likewise they could embed ads in the API as a condition of access (even granting ad-free access for premium members).

For whatever reason they chose not to do these things. I’m leaning towards incompetence rather than malice.