After eight years of life, Apollo is forced to close because the developer does not have enough time to recalculate its business modified by Reddit’s paid APIs. Social media companies are in a hurry to buffer costs. Is free internet running out?

Apollo, a popular iOS app for using Reddit developed by Christian Selig, has announced its closure due to the move to Reddit’s paid APIs. Selig quits not because he wants to continue using his free access to Reddit, but because the social news site doesn’t give him enough time to test changes to his business. Scenarios that, like the one generated by the Twitter API, which have also become paid, depict an Internet that is less and less free in its social expressions.

What is this story of Apollo and Reddit

The facts of Apollo – and other platform communities preparing for a June 12-13 content strike – start when Reddit announced on May 18, 2023, that the APIs used by third-party apps would become paid .

Six weeks after that announcement, prices were announced. As for Apollo, that’s $0.24 per 1,000 API calls. The Apollo developer, who generated 7 billion API requests last month, calculated that his app would cost him nearly $2 million a month, or more than $20 million a year.

Apollo is not only free, but also provides subscriptions for users who want to have something more, and in Europe it costs 13.99 euros a year for Apollo Ultra (there is also Apollo Pro which costs less).

Selig didn’t react badly to the paid API announcement because he agreed Reddit can’t “foot the bill for third-party apps in the long run, because it’s not sustainable.” And he saw the opportunity as a way to “develop a more tangible relationship with Reddit, with better API support for users.”

Apollo has been accused by Reddit of being inefficient in handling its API calls, but Selig explained that its requests hit only 0.4% of the limit imposed by the site. In any case, it was ready to lower the daily request cap and review the cost of subscriptions, but Reddit has only given 30 days notice to all developers to adapt to the new paid APIs.

Selig, like other developers, deemed one month’s notice insufficient to apply the changes to business as well, and to balance the entry of new users at the increased price and the expiring plans of old users.

The developer then cited the case of Apple which, when it bought the Dark Sky app to integrate its technologies into the Weather app, gave the company a 30-month transition period. Selig didn’t expect such a long notice, but neither did Reddit’s 30 days, deemed too short.

Paid APIs will go live on July 1st (charged on August 1st) and, not having enough time to retool its app and migration and integration between subscription plans, Selig decided to shut down Apollo on June 30th.

The Reddit Community Protest: Closes June 12-13

This story is the tip of the iceberg of a discontent that has mounted over the weeks in a part of the Reddit communities immediately after the announcement of the paid APIs and above all after having exposed the price list.

Some protests have come from communities that bring together people with disabilities, given that many of the third-party apps, in difficulty due to API payments, allow you to access Reddit with accessibility tools that the original app does not have. However, Reddit is considering exempting apps with particular accessibility features from paying for the API.

Through the activities of many subreddits, the site’s community has established a two-day content strike, with shutdowns running from June 12-13, and with some subreddits continuing their protests to the bitter end.

Social platforms must be part of the costs

Reddit decided to charge for its APIs because, as a Reddit spokesperson told Mashable: “We spend several million dollars on hosting fees and Reddit needs to be paid fairly to continue supporting third-party apps. high usage. Our pricing is based on usage levels, so they are comparable to our costs.”

In March, after previously denying access to its API to third-party apps, Twitter also introduced its pricing, which includes a free tier up to 1,500 tweets per month, Basic at $100 per month for 3,000 tweets, Pro at $5,000 a month for 300,000 tweets and Enterprise, which starts at $42,000 a month at the lowest tier.

Twitter must recover a debt from the acquisition of Elon Musk, which weighs 1.5 billion in interest a year. Reddit needs to recoup hosting costs generated by API requests used by third-party apps.

It is risky to say that the free Internet as it has been known so far, at least for its social expressions, is on the way out. Yet the movements of Twitter and Reddit have a certain weight, and the growth of Internet users (5.3 billion in 2022 compared to 4.9 in 2021), and consequently of access to sites and platforms that also increase costs hosting, it may have some influence.

The growth of users also suggests the increase in revenues, especially advertising revenues, but in 2022 the Economist began to recognize a certain decline in the large advertising sellers, above all due to the changes to privacy introduced by Apple with iOS 14.5 in 2021 come with a delayed effect on the market.

If advertising brings less revenue but costs remain the same or even increase, the alternative way is to obtain revenue directly from the subscriptions of users who use the services. In fact, Twitter has introduced Twitter Blue (In Italy since February 2023) at a cost of 9.76 euros per month or 102.48 euros per year.