Developer Says Access to Reddit's API Would Cost Him $20M Per Year

Reddit's plan to charge for extended API access may be the end of Apollo, a popular Reddit client, the app's developer says.

In a Reddit thread, Christian Selig says Reddit's expected pricing structure for API access would cost Apollo $1.7 million per month or $20 million per year, since Apollo made 7 billion requests in 2022. "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," he says.

In April, Reddit joined the likes of Twitter in announcing it would charge third-party developers for access to its API. That move is intended to stop tech companies from scraping Reddit’s data to train their AI language models while offering no benefit to the social media platform and its users.

Reddit's pricing was disclosed in a call Selig had with Reddit, he says. "I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined."

In his post, Selig also pointed to the affordability of Imgur, which he said only charges Apollo $166 a month for API access.

Selig tells PCMag that he had another phone call with Reddit after posting the thread, where the social media site did not indicate that it's willing to be flexible on pricing, "even if just a little bit."

Selig adds that he spoke to "pretty much all the developers of other large third-party Reddit apps across iOS and Android" and "all of them seem to echo the same sentiments" he has on the pricing issue. Selig says app developers who depend on ad revenue to pay their API bills are in an even stickier situation as they rely on ad revenue to pay their bills, and "Reddit has disallowed that as a revenue mechanism for third-party apps."

Reddit has said it will enforce the new API charges on July 1, though Selig tells PCMag that the company is "willing to be flexible on the [payment] timeline." Reddit did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment.

In the comment section of Selig's thread, redditors overwhelmingly criticized the pricing change, and responded with messages of support. One top upvoted comment reads: "Their pricing is outlandish. If they don’t compromise or another solution isn’t found, well I certainly won’t be an active Reddit user any longer as I use Apollo almost exclusively." Another commented: "It’s been a good run folks.”

Twitter’s move earlier this year to charge enterprise users a minimum of $42,000 per month for access to its API has resulted in the demise of several apps. WordPress also ended its JetPack sharing plugin with Twitter.