Now Apollo faces the cliff

First off: Bad blood, Reddit has lied constantly throughout this. They also refused to give him an extension and then turned around and gave it to other apps. I wouldn’t trust them enough to continue building on their platform.

Second: $3-5 is too low. Christian’s estimates of API usage average included free users, paid users have higher costs as they have higher usage (they are power users, normal Reddit users don’t care about 3rd party apps) and there is another tier above that of super-power-users. Since the costs are usage based he’d have to do some kind of “base tier with recharge packs” or multiple tiers and keep close track of your usage. All things that aren’t in existence today (in his stack) and so see my first point about not wanting to build on shifting sands.

We will see if other app devs who got extensions are able to make it work, I think the costs are going to be higher than people think. I say this as someone who had considered paying up to $15/mo for Apollo if he could make it work but as it stands now I’m off Reddit.

You should go and read the extremely detailed posts Christian shared in r/apolloapp. The dude really considered everything, but it’s a non-starter: Reddit do not want 3rd-party clients, so it’d be foolish to build further on top of this platform even if it were practical, which it absolutely is not.