What began as a planned two-day event for popular Reddit communities to protest planned changes that will put an end to popular Reddit apps has turned into an indefinite standoff between Reddit moderators and executives.
Hundreds of subreddits maintained private status beyond the end of the Reddit boycott and planned to do so indefinitely. A leaked memo from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman confirmed that the platform intends to proceed with plans to limit API access to paying customers.
The options discussed with Reddit app developers have left them with no other choice but to shut down tools that thousands of Redditors have benefited from for decades.
Meanwhile, Reddit reportedly could go public this year, valued at an estimated $15 billion, as Huffman maintains focused on profitability in the comments of a recent AMA.
The following are messages from the people behind some of the top Reddit apps offering insight into why they are being forced to shut down.
Monthly Cost For Reddit API Access: $2 Million
According to a post from Christian Selig, creator of Apollo for Reddit for iOS, with over 170k ratings in the App Store, access to the Reddit API would cost $2 million monthly.
The price they gave was $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. I quickly inputted this in my app, and saw that it was not far off Twitter’s outstandingly high API prices, at $12,000, and with my current usage would cost almost $2 million dollars per month, or over $20 million per year. That is not an exaggeration, that is just multiplying the 7 billion requests Apollo made last month by the price per request.
While Selig appreciates the support of subreddits boycotting the API changes, Apollo plans to shut down on June 30.
Rumored discussions between the popular app developer and Reddit led to one of Huffman’s most downvoted comments on Reddit on the API changes.