Reddit's new API pricing could kill its most popular app with a $20 million bill

Twitter isn't the only social media platform setting fire to it's third-party app ecosystem in an attempt to monetize its API.

Christian Selig, the developer of the popular Reddit client Apollo, announced on Wednesday that he may soon have to shut down the app because of Reddit's new API pricing structure.

In a post on Reddit, Selig explained that he's been talking with the company since it announced its plan to start charging for API access to its platform. Selig says that in his discussion, Reddit said it would charge a whopping $12,000 per 50 million API requests.

What does this mean for Apollo? The app may very well have to shut down. Selig says that Apollo made 7 billion API requests last month, which would result in a $1.7 million bill just for that 30 day period. He further explained that even if he cut out all free users and went strictly with a subscription-only model, he'd still be in the red financially with Reddit's new API pricing.

"For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly," he said, further breaking down that each user would cost him around $2.50 per month. Apollo's premium subscription tier, Apollo Ultra, currently only costs $1.49 per month or $12.99 per year. There's also a $50 lifetime plan, which very likely would no longer be feasible to say the least.

Reddit first announced its plans to start charging for API access back in April, shortly after Elon Musk's Twitter began doing the same. At the time, Reddit seemed to state that these API changes were mostly being implemented to stop tech companies from scraping data to train their AI language models without any real benefit to Reddit and its users. Based on what Reddit previously said, developers that were specifically using the API to enhance the Reddit experience, like Selig does with Apollo, weren't going to see any real changes.

That appears to no longer be the case as Reddit roles out its new API prices.

The move to monetize its API may feel like déjà vu to developers who also just dealt with similar API pricing issues with Twitter. For Reddit, the need to monetize its API may be a case of a company looking for additional revenue streams just as its about to announce an IPO later this year.

Redditors have not taken kindly to the actions of the company, however. Selig's Reddit post about the yearly $20 million fee that would likely kill Apollo has been the top post on the website for hours now. Users have been stating that they would simply stop visiting Reddit altogether if it killed Apollo and the rest of its third-party app ecosystem with this new API pricing structure.

As of publishing, Selig's post has more than 124,000 upvotes and 11,300 comments.

"Bye Bye Reddit then," wrote one Redditor with a top upvoted comment. "Without third party apps, I'll abandon Reddit like I abandoned Twitter."

"It’s been a good run folks," replied another.