Reddit API Pricing

Reddit API pricing refers to the paid terms the company introduced in 2023 for high-volume access to its data API, which had been free since 2008. Announced on 18 April 2023 and effective from 1 July 2023, the new rate was reported at roughly 24 cents per thousand API requests, a figure derived from the developer of the popular client Apollo, who said he had been quoted about twelve thousand dollars per fifty million requests.

The pricing matters because, while Reddit framed it as charging commercial actors and AI scrapers for access to its data, it fell heavily on independent app developers. Apollo, whose usage ran into billions of requests per month, said the charges would cost it on the order of twenty million dollars a year and would force it to close, and clients such as Reddit Is Fun, Sync and BaconReader shut down as well. The change triggered the June 2023 blackout, in which thousands of communities went private in protest, making API pricing one of the defining flashpoints in the relationship between Reddit, its developers and its moderators.