Apollo for Reddit might shut down due to Reddit’s new API pricing

If you’re a fan of Reddit, you’ve likely heard of the Apollo for Reddit app. Well, it might not be around much longer if the founder gets priced out with Reddit’s new API pricing.

Christian Selig, the creator of the Apollo for Reddit app, took to Twitter today to announce that he had just gotten off a call with Reddit about its new API pricing. According to Selig, the new policy will require an app like Apollo to pay $20 million per year to continue to use its API.

In a more lengthy post on Reddit (of course), the company says that Reddit’s new API pricing is similar to Twitter’s, which was met with widespread criticism by those who enjoyed clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific. Twitter, of course, went further and even banned third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific from using the API, effectively killing those businesses. Tweetbot’s owner then pivoted and released Ivory for Mastodon.

According to Apollo’s team, Reddit’s new API pricing would stick the company with a roughly $20 million bill every year:

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. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.

Selig says that “while Reddit has been communicative and civil throughout this process with half a dozen phone calls back and forth that I thought went really well, I don’t see how this pricing is anything based in reality or remotely reasonable. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card.”

If Reddit does go through with this pricing change, it could mean that the Apollo for Reddit app goes away like the Tweetbot and Twitterrific Twitter clients before it. Unless, of course, Reddit changes its mind or Apollo increases its pricing, and people actually pay for it.