Discontinued

Reddit's API Was Free for 15 Years. Then It Would Have Cost One Developer $20 Million.

Reddit's API had been effectively free since 2008, which is how an entire ecosystem of third-party apps — some of them better than Reddit's own official app — got built on top of it for free, for fifteen years. In April 2023, Reddit announced it would start charging for that access. One developer did the math on what it would cost to keep his app alive, and the answer was $20 million a year. He shut it down. Thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. Reddit's CEO was not moved.

Fifteen Years of Free, Then a Price Tag

Reddit's justification leaned heavily on the AI boom: its user-generated content had become valuable training data, and unrestricted free API access meant that value was leaking out to anyone with a scraper — including, awkwardly, some of the same third-party apps beloved by Reddit's most devoted users. The new pricing came in at $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, a number that sounds small until an app has millions of users making calls all day, every day.

Apollo's Developer Did the Math Out Loud

Christian Selig, the sole developer behind the popular third-party app Apollo, published his cost estimate on May 31, 2023: at Reddit's new pricing, Apollo would owe roughly $20 million a year to keep operating — a number he described as "far more than I ever could have imagined." He noted the average Apollo user would cost him about $2.50 a month in API fees, against the roughly $0.12 a month Reddit reportedly earns per user in ad revenue — a gap of about twenty times. On June 8, 2023, Selig announced Apollo would shut down at the end of the month.

Thousands of Subreddits Went Dark

Starting June 12, 2023, moderators of thousands of subreddits — including some of the site's largest, like r/videos and r/lifeprotips — set their communities to private in a coordinated blackout protest, at its peak involving somewhere north of 7,000 subreddits. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman responded with an unusually combative internal AMA, at one point pushing back directly on Selig's cost breakdown rather than reconsidering the pricing that produced it.

The Apps Died. The Pricing Stayed.

Apollo shut down on schedule on June 30, 2023, joining several other prominent third-party apps that couldn't make the new math work. Reddit's official app absorbed the users who stayed. The blackout ended without reversing the policy — a fairly clean demonstration that a protest can be large, loud, and completely correct about the numbers, and still not be the thing that decides the outcome.

Filed from public reporting:

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