Popular Reddit client Apollo will shut down after talks over new developer fees got 'ugly,' with allegations of blackmail

• Apollo, a popular third-party app for accessing Reddit, announced it will shut down June 30.
• Reddit has started charging developers for access to its content.

Apollo, a popular app for accessing Reddit, will shut down on June 30, a casualty of the social media company's decision to begin charging developers for access to its content.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the decision to charge for access to the craze of generative AI sweeping the tech industry, saying that developers have been scraping Reddit's website to train large language models.

Chatbots like ChatGPT rely on large amounts of content scraped from the web to learn how to generate their own humanlike text. Reddit argues that its vast collection of user-generated text is a valuable asset that other company's should be required to pay for if they want to use it.

The Apollo app has been swept up in this battle, which technically revolves around access to Reddit's application programming interface. An API is a common piece of software that helps different apps exchange data.

Christian Selig, the developer of Apollo, argued that Reddit's decision to charge for access, while understandable, is not being implemented in a way "based in reality." He said Reddit is asking Apollo to pay $0.24 cents for every 1,000 requests to its API, which would cost $20 million a year based on the app's current usage. Numbers disclosed by Selig in a post about the shutdown indicate that Apollo currently has about 50,000 users paying $10 a year, which equates to revenue of $500,000 annually.

Reddit declined to comment on the API pricing or the news of Apollo's shutdown. Huffman will be hosting an "ask me anything" discussion on Friday where he will take questions regarding the API changes.

ChatGPT, and the broader generative AI boom, has set up an epic battle over the future of web content and copyright. Leading AI companies, including OpenAI and Google, won't let their content be used to train AI models, however, they have been using content from Reddit, The Wall Street Journal and thousands of other sites to train their own models for years.

Elon Musk has cracked down on API access, too

Reddit is not the only company that's had enough of this. Twitter began clamping down on API access after Elon Musk acquired the company for $44 billion. Musk has threatened to sue OpenAI backer Microsoft, claiming it abused its access to the Twitter API, a threat which came shortly after Twitter dramatically increased the pricing for its API tiers. Twitter also banned third-party clients altogether, killing off popular apps like Tweetbot. Third-party clients did not include the advertisements that make money for Twitter.

Reddit filed to go public in late 2021 while the market was hot but before the tech industry experienced a downturn and the number of new IPOs came crashing down. Reports suggest the company has not yet turned a profit, which could explain why it's delayed a public offering in the current environment. Charging for API access could help bring in more revenue.

Blackmail allegation

Among Selig's allegations is one that Huffman stated in a phone call that Selig was blackmailing Reddit with a suggestion that the company buy Apollo for $10 million in order for him to "go quiet." But Selig had earlier clarified on a call with Reddit staff that he was being misinterpreted. In his words, Selig was not threatening reputational harm to Reddit, but merely trying to come to a fair compromise for him to either shut down Apollo or see Reddit take ownership of the app.

"As said, a common suggestion across the many threads on this topic was 'If third-party apps are costing Reddit so much money, why don't they just buy them out like they did Alien Blue?' That was the point I brought up," Selig writes. "If running Apollo as it stands now would cost you $20 million yearly as you quote, I suggested you cut a check to me to end Apollo. I said I'd even do it for half that or six months worth: $10 million, what a deal!"

Reddit employees on the call initially interpreted his suggestion as a threat, according to Selig. Despite clearing up the situation and staff acknowledging that Selig wasn't making demands, Huffman allegedly later said on a separate call that Selig had threatened he would cause trouble if Reddit didn't give him a large payout. Selig recorded his initial call with Reddit's team, and published transcripts he says support his allegations.