Apollo could go out of business due to new Reddit API pricing

The creator of Apollo, one of the most popular third-party mobile apps for browsing Reddit, may be forced to shut down its product due to Reddit’s recently announced new API pricing terms. App developer Christian Selig said today that Reddit’s new API pricing is bad news for the future of third-party apps, as he will now need to pay around $20 million a year to keep Apollo running the business as usual. In light of the news, there is already growing customer reaction to Reddit’s terms, given the Apollo app’s long history of thoughtful updates, iOS-friendly design, and overall ease of use, making the app a popular alternative to the official Reddit client.

The news is unexpected, as Reddit has assured developers that the API pricing change will not affect those who build apps that help people use Reddit. Instead, the move was touted as a way to protect a large forum site from becoming free fodder for companies that train their AI systems on big data sets from the internet. Basically, Reddit wanted to get paid for its “corpus of data,” founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times.

Developers who want to create apps and bots, and researchers who want to explore Reddit for academic or non-commercial purposes won’t have to pay for the API, he says.

True, this applied to developers creating products on Reddit, and not outside of it, like Apollo. The developer shared that, according to a phone conversation with Reddit, under the new terms of the API, 50 million requests will now cost $12,000 – “a figure much more than I could have imagined.”

“Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which translates into roughly $1.7 million per month, or $20 million per year,” Selig explained.

The developer also said that making the application only available to subscribers to reduce the number of requests would not be a solution either, since the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which means it will cost the average user $2.50 per month. That figure is more than double the current subscription price, Selig said.

Apollo developer has spoken to Reddit on numerous occasions to discuss these pricing issues, and while he described the conversations as polite and communicative, he expressed that he was “deeply disappointed” with the results.

Today, Apollo has about 1.3-1.5 million monthly active users, Selig told TechCrunch, and roughly 900,000 daily active users. Third-party estimates confirm that Apollo has about 5 million installations to date. While Selig declined to share specific Apollo earnings data, he said, “It’s not even within the realm of possibility and not close to what Reddit suggests.”

“Even if I kicked out all users, except for those who pay a subscription, I would still be in the red every month,” Selig laments. He also said that he didn’t have a plan B, as he didn’t expect to receive such news.

Reddit’s decision to raise prices for API access followed a similar move by Twitter. The latter ended up cutting off much of the Twitter third-party developer ecosystem from being able to access Twitter’s developer tools. As a result, numerous Twitter applications, clients and services have been shut down or switched to other areas, such as supporting Twitter’s open source rival Mastodon.

Apollo first appeared on the App Store in 2017. At the time, the app offered a unique experience with features such as custom gestures, a media viewer, a full Markdown editor, and other features inspired by feedback from Reddit users. Over the years, Apollo users have appreciated the app’s customizability and power user experience, as well as its iOS-friendly design. Selig said he wanted to create a Reddit app that he thought could be built by Apple itself.

The developer is also quick to adopt new iOS features, as was the case recently with the launch of lock screen widgets for iOS 16, for example. Selig also had some fun with the new Dynamic Island UI update, which transformed the tablet-shaped notch at the top of the iPhone 14 Pro into an interactive function for notifications. He came up with Tamagotchi-style smart pets, or “Pixel Pals”, that could run across the cutout. The pets were so popular that they soon had their own mobile app.