“I don’t have that kind of money”: Apollo developer charges against Reddit for the high prices to use the API

At the end of April we learned that Reddit would start charging a monthly fee for the use of its API. In other words, the element through which external companies can access data of the platform for tasks as varied as running third-party applications or training artificial intelligence models.

At that time, the prices were not yet defined, although there was a promise that they would be announced “in the coming weeks.” The days have passed and now we have news coming directly from Christian Selig, the developer of the Reddit client for iOS called Apollo. According to him, there is little to celebrate.

The price to use the Reddit API

Selig says that the prices to use the Reddit API are “much higher than I could have imagined.” In addition, he accuses the platform of not fulfilling its promise to establish a “reasonable” scheme and not to follow in the footsteps of Twitter (remember that Elon Musk’s social network closed access to its free API).

The head of Apollo claims that Reddit wants to charge $12,500 for 50 million API requests. Based on this price, if you take into account that the client made 7 billion requests last month, they would have to pay $1.7 million per month, or about $20 million per year to keep the app running.

Apollo is a free Reddit client, but allows users to pay $4.99 for access to a “Pro” version that offers additional features or $1.49 per month ($12.99 per year) for even more additional features. According to Selig, in order to face the cost of the API, it should modify its prices.

The client’s average users, says the developer, make about 344 daily API requests, which would translate into a monthly cost of $2.50, higher values ​​than those currently established (it should be noted that, for the moment, Apollo has not announced price increases in its application).

“I hope it goes without saying that I don’t have that kind of money,” Selig says. The developer also claims to have tried through a dozen calls to convince Reddit to make the price more flexible of using their API, but was unsuccessful. We have to wait to find out which way Reddit and Apollo will follow after this news.

Recall that Steve Huffman, the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, said in april that the Reddit API would remain free for developers who want to build apps that “help people use the platform” and researchers for academic (and non-commercial) purposes. For companies that “crawl Reddit, generate value and give nothing back” they will have to pay, he said.

Images: Reddit | pch.vector | Apollo

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