Still feeling the effects of the Chip Shortage of 2020-2022. They are still making a lot of pi’s, but they have a huge backlog to work away. Large contracts get priority over distributors, unfortunately, so they are very hard to find.
https://rpilocator.com/ scrapes the web and displays available stock. Managed to get a rpi4 8GB a couple of weeks ago.
Also, they make it sound like the problem is the 3rd party app users will have to pay. That’s not the issue. Probably most of those users would be happy to pay some monthly fee to keep their app running. It’s how much they are charging for the API that is the problem, and the lack of time to actually implement it.
That and the abhorrent behavior of the reddit team, the last weeks.