Apollo for Reddit: One Price List Ended a Solo App With 1.5M Monthly Users — a Projected $20M a Year, and $250,000 in Refunds

On June 8, 2023, Christian Selig, a solo developer in Halifax, Canada, posted: “Apollo will close down on June 30th. Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue.”

Apollo for Reddit was an unofficial app for reading and posting on Reddit. Per BetaKit, at shutdown it had around 1.5 million monthly active users and about 50,000 paying subscribers. Wikipedia’s summary puts daily actives at roughly 900,000 and lifetime installs at about 5 million. The developer was one person, a former Apple intern.

Then a price list arrived from the platform. Under the new API pricing, Apollo’s bill would have been $20 million a year. Not revenue: cost. This case is worth reading as the most concrete possible record of what it means to run a business on someone else’s foundation.

What happened

Apollo made 7 billion API requests in the preceding month. At the new rates that is $1.7–2 million a month, over $20 million a year. iDropNews breaks it down usefully: the average user generates 344 requests a day, which at the new price works out to $2.50 per user per month, more, per user, than what the subscription cost.

Reddit had indicated a figure of about $0.12 per user by its own numbers. Selig called the actual price a 20x difference.

Fixed revenue, metered cost

The heart of this shutdown is not whether Reddit acted well or badly but the fact that revenue and cost were indexed to different things.

Apollo’s monetisation was a free app plus a one-time unlock and an annual subscription. Per iDropNews, existing subscribers paid $10 a year. AppleInsider reports roughly 50,000 annual subscribers. Selig never published a revenue figure, but multiplying those two gives an order of $500,000 a year from annual subscriptions alone. (The monthly figure in this article’s data fields is that calculation divided by twelve, not a disclosure.)

Cost, meanwhile, grew every time a user opened the app and scrolled. Heavy users cost more, and the subscription price was locked in annually. Raising prices does not help either: an Apple subscription change cannot be applied to existing contracts immediately. As Selig put it, if you wait for subscriptions to expire they shrink month by month, and during that wait, the costs keep running.

Price fixed, cost proportional to usage. That asymmetry is absorbable if you own the right to reprice. If you do not, one move by whoever sets the price destroys the structure. GummySearch, which chose to close while still profitable, was also built on Reddit’s API and hit the same wall from a different direction: it could not obtain a commercial licence.

The $250,000 clean-up

There was a second layer of cost. Unused portions of annual subscriptions are automatically refunded pro rata through Apple, and that money comes out of the developer’s pocket. Selig estimated about $250,000.

His response was to ship a final update with a feature that let users decline their refund. He included wallpapers drawn by Apollo’s icon artists, and on the last day unlocked every feature for everyone. Designing the shutdown itself is rare.

The scale of the protest is worth recording too. TechCrunch reported 2,740 subreddits joining the June 12 action. BetaKit put more than 6,000 subreddits going dark. ReddPlanet, RIF (Reddit is Fun) and Infinity for Reddit announced closures or pivots in the same window. This was not one person’s problem but an ecosystem’s.

Not “what didn’t work” — there was nothing to play

In most shutdown cases you can weigh the merits of the decisions taken. Not here. Thirty days’ notice, costs dozens of times revenue, and repricing that the platform’s own rules prevented from taking effect quickly. There were no moves left on the board.

If anything could have helped, it was earlier design: caching to cut request volume, diversified revenue, owning data assets of your own. But each requires spending effort, in an era of free APIs, on the assumption that they will one day be charged for. Put alongside Content Goblin, whose MRR collapsed after a terms change, and the 30-app portfolio rebuilt after an Apple suspension cut revenue by 75%, the common thread is a single one: zero negotiating power against one platform.

Pixel Pals and Juno: the shutdown did not stop the building

Selig has kept building since. Pixel Pals, the Tamagotchi-like feature inside Apollo, was spun out as a standalone app and got a 2.0 release in September 2023. Juno, a YouTube client for Vision Pro, is also his. What depended on Reddit was the product, not his capacity to ship, an easy thing to miss when reading shutdown stories.

Apollo was not a failed product. A million and a half people used it every month and 50,000 paid for it. The $250,000 in refunds was the flip side of those 50,000 subscribers. And still, when the owner of the foundation rewrote the price, it was gone in 22 days. That fact is the whole point.