Well, this is a mess.
Following the recent coverage, including our own, of Reddit’s decision to begin charging access to its API (Application Programming Interface) and the effect this has had on third-party clients, Apollo has announced that the API change is forcing Apollo to go offline completely.
“Apollo will close down on June 30″ Christian Selig announced today. “Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue. Thank you so, so much for all the support over the years.”
The issue at hand is Reddit’s decision to charge $0.02 per user for access to its service. While that doesn’t sound like much, Apollo would see a bill that estimated $20 million annually before ever turning a profit from developing the app.
Christian offered the following explanation as to why increasing the cost of accessing Apollo isn’t a viable idea either:
“Going from a free API for 8 years to suddenly incurring massive costs is not something I can feasibly make work with only 30 days, he writes. “That’s a lot of users to migrate, plans to create, things to test, and to get through app review, and it’s just not economically feasible. It’s much cheaper for me to simply shut down.”
As such, Apollo will lose access to the Reddit API on June 30 to ensure that no cost is incurred under the new Reddit policy. Current subscribers will find themselves in a very similar situation to what Tapbots and The Icon Factory faced with Tweetbot and Twitterrific when Twitter effectively killed its free API. Once Apollo’s API is removed, it will no longer be able to access content from Reddit. This, in turn, could lead a number of users to request a refund on annual subscriptions to the app, which Christian estimates that he would be on the hook for a quarter of a million dollars if or when this happens.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.