After sharing last week that Apollo for Reddit might shut down due to Reddit’s new API pricing, the app’s creator Christian Selig announced that it will indeed close down Apollo on June 30th due to “Reddit’s recent decisions and actions.” Interestingly enough, this comes just after Apple gave a shout-out to the app during its WWDC 2023 keynote.
In April, Reddit announced it would change its API by moving to a paid model for third-party apps. From there, Selig received several phone calls from Reddit’s team to explain how it planned to charge “equitable pricing based in reality.”
After a few weeks of discussion, the platform said it would charge $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. For Apollo, it would mean almost 2 million dollars per month or over $20 million per year. That way, he decided to shut down the app.
Apollo for Reddit creator also shared some recorded conversations with the platform; he talks about how Reddit slandered him when he offered to be bought by the company and also explained why not just increasing the price of his app would be enough. He wrote:
“One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, (…) Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That’s $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days. So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. (…) It would be cheaper to simply refund users.”
The full post explains everything behind what’s happening with Apollo’s creator and Reddit, which you can read here.
BGR will bring a follow-up of this story as we learn more about it.
