An Eight-Year Product Broke at One API

On August 5 this year, Reddit published an infrastructure update.

The company said it would keep limited public API access, gradually restrict new access requests, and require third-party apps to move onto Reddit's own Developer Platform.

An API is the doorway a platform leaves open for outside software. A third-party app that wants to read posts, comments, or user actions has to pass through that doorway.

Reddit also said the door was not closing that day and that the transition would take time. Still, the words “limited access” and “gradually restrict” brought back the story of an app from three years earlier.

It was called Apollo. It had been built for eight years, and its life ended at that doorway.

In June 2023, Apollo developer Christian Selig published a shutdown notice.

He had started building the Reddit client just after university and eventually turned it into his full-time job. While writing the shutdown post, he was in California for Apple's developer conference. He cut the trip short and flew home to deal with the crisis.

The number that changed the equation was Reddit's new API price: $0.24 per 1,000 calls.

Apollo had made about seven billion calls in the previous month. Multiplying that usage by the rate gives $1.68 million a month, or about $20.16 million a year. In his post, Selig described it as nearly $2 million per month and more than $20 million per year.

This was not a settled invoice. It was the developer's estimate based on the previous month's usage. He also acknowledged that usage could be reduced with enough time. Even if he kept only paying subscribers, however, the subscription revenue at the time would not cover the new API cost.

On the evening of June 30, he deleted Apollo's API token. That token was a digital key. Once it was gone, the app's design and subscriber base could no longer unlock Reddit's content.

Whether an eight-year product could stay in business ultimately depended on whether someone else still allowed that key to open the door.

The story is incomplete if it only blames the platform.

Reddit's public position was that large-scale API use carries infrastructure costs and opportunity costs such as lost advertising. The company also said that most non-commercial apps below its free threshold would not pay. The paid tier targeted commercial apps that needed much higher usage.

The platform was balancing its own books. That is normal. In 2026, Reddit made its direction even clearer: it wants more third-party software to run inside its own Developer Platform. It also announced a $1 million App Migration Program to support the move.

That does not look like a platform trying to remove every developer. It looks like a platform pulling interfaces, runtime, and rule-making authority back into its own system.

For an independent developer, that is precisely the point.

Growing through a platform is different from leaving the entire business inside it.

Apollo had a product, a reputation, paying users, and enough revenue to be its developer's full-time work. But its content came from Reddit, login depended on Reddit, and the product's right to exist depended on Reddit's API rules. Apollo could neither move nor replace its most important raw material.

The idea of building an independent product without relying on any platform is mostly another fantasy.

Payments, cloud infrastructure, app stores, and distribution all come from somewhere. A small team does not need to rebuild every wheel.

The useful question is what remains when a platform pulls the plug.

Can users still be reached somewhere outside the platform? Can the product's own data be exported and used in another system? Does revenue come through more than one channel? If a particular API disappears, does the core product become inconvenient, or does it become useless?

Consider two products that each have one thousand paying users. If those users exist only as platform accounts, a single suspension can cut off contact. If the product has permission-based email contacts, accounts under its own domain, and exportable order records, it can still explain who bought what after moving elsewhere.

The user count is identical. What the product actually keeps is completely different.

The same is true for an API. A replacement does not have to be built in advance, but the product ledger should already show how long a switch would take, which features would stop, and how much of a price increase the business could absorb. Otherwise, growth is only enlarging an undocumented single point of failure.

Those questions will not add a user today. They change what the product is accumulating over time.

If each day leaves behind code you own, portable data, users you can reach again, and revenue that does not depend on a single entrance, the platform is helping you build a road.

If each day only pushes more usage through the same doorway, better numbers may simply make the eventual breaking point higher.

Reddit's new announcement has not closed that doorway overnight. It is even putting money into migration.

Apollo already demonstrated the other ending three years ago: an eight-year product stopped quietly on June 30 when its developer deleted one token.

Platforms can be borrowed, and their rules can be followed.

As a product grows day by day, the harder question is which parts are becoming truly yours.