The popular third-party Reddit app Apollo is shutting down on June 30, 2023, as a direct result of Reddit’s recently announced new API pricing plans. The new pricing would have ended up costing Apollo $20 million per year to continue to operate its business — an unsustainable ask for an indie developer.
The app’s maker, Christian Selig, had been one of the first to call out the impact Reddit’s new API pricing would have on third-party Reddit apps, noting that even if Apollo switched to a subscription-only model, it would still be in the red under the new API guidelines. Since then, other app makers have come forward to share their same concerns and community backlash has prompted a site-wide protest with several top communities planning to go dark to send a message to Reddit leadership.
Reddit first announced its plans to adjust its API pricing in an interview with The New York Times, where it was positioned as a way to help keep Reddit’s sizable online forum site from becoming free fodder for companies training their AI systems on large swaths of the internet. Reddit has since said the move was not meant to “kill” third-party apps, but it’s hard to see how it would not, given the price increases.
After Selig’s call with Reddit to discuss pricing, he seemed to realize running the app would be unsustainable as a business.
“I’ll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined,” he wrote on the Apollo app’s subreddit last week. “Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year,” adding that he was “deeply disappointed in this price” and that Reddit had promised pricing would be reasonable and not operate like Twitter.
Twitter’s API price increases under new owner Elon Musk put a number of smaller projects, startups, helpful bots and third-party clients out of business. Even researchers and academics were impacted, leading to heavy ridicule and criticism of how Twitter was destroying its wider developer community out of greed.
It remains to be seen whether Reddit will reverse course on its API pricing plans or if more third-party apps will be forced to shut down as a result. But one thing is clear: Reddit’s decision has had a chilling effect on the development of third-party apps and has alienated a large number of its users.
