What happened
On April 18, 2023, Reddit announced that it would begin charging for access to its data API, ending a policy under which the API had been broadly free since 2008. The company framed the change as part of a push to be compensated for the value of its content, particularly by AI firms scraping Reddit data to train large language models, and it came as Reddit prepared for an eventual public offering. While the announcement was light on specifics, the eventual pricing proved far steeper than developers anticipated.
The scale became clear at the end of May, when Apollo developer Christian Selig revealed that Reddit's rate of roughly $0.24 per 1,000 API calls (about $12,000 per 50 million requests) would cost his app an estimated $20 million per year given its usage. Developers of other popular third-party clients, including Reddit Is Fun and Sync, said the fees would force them to shut down. The pricing decision set off one of the most consequential community revolts in Reddit's history, culminating in a mass blackout that June.