The Day Reddit Went Dark: What Happens When a Free API Suddenly Has a Price
Over 8,000 subreddits shut down, Apollo closed, and every product built on someone else's platform got a warning.
On Monday 12 June 2023, more than 8,000 subreddits went private or restricted posting at the same moment. TechCrunch reports that 8,300 communities had pledged to take part, and counts 28,606 moderators behind the effort. Communities most people have run into without ever holding an account — r/funny, r/aww, r/gaming, r/Pics, r/science, r/todayilearned — simply stopped being readable. The stated plan is a blackout lasting 48 hours.
The protest is not about moderation or content policy. It is about a price. On 18 April 2023, Reddit announced it would begin charging for access to its API, the machine-readable interface that third-party developers had until then used free of charge to build their own Reddit apps. The new pricing is due to take effect on 1 July.
By the time the blackout began, the argument was largely settled. Apollo, Reddit is Fun and Sync — three of the best-known independent Reddit apps — had already announced they would shut down by 30 June, and ReddPlanet has said it will close as well. The protest is being held for software whose developers have already committed to switching it off.
Seventy-three days from announcement to shutdown
On 31 May, Christian Selig, the developer behind Apollo, published the figure Reddit had quoted him: 12,000 dollars for 50 million API requests, which at his app's volume worked out to roughly 20 million dollars a year. He said the app could not carry that cost. On 8 June he announced Apollo would close on 30 June. The gap between Reddit's announcement and that shutdown date is seventy-three days.
Reddit's reasoning is straightforward and, on its own terms, defensible. Chief executive Steve Huffman framed it in April as a question about data — "The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable," he told the New York Times — and argued the company should not hand that value to the world's largest companies for nothing. The announcement came as Reddit was reported to be weighing a stock market listing. A company spokesperson has said the pricing is based on usage levels the company measures as comparable to its own costs, and pointed to the millions of dollars Reddit spends on hosting. There are carve-outs: non-commercial moderation tools and accessibility-focused apps keep free access.
What has not happened is a change in price. Tens of thousands of moderators have taken the site's biggest communities offline, and as this is written the pricing stands unchanged. That is the detail worth carrying away: the protest is large, well organised and sympathetically covered, and so far it has not moved the number.
What this means if you are building something
Almost every site we build stands on somebody else's API. A map, a payment, a newsletter, an embedded video, a login through Google, a feed of reviews. That is usually the right decision — writing your own mapping service is not a sensible use of a client's budget. But the Reddit episode restates the terms of the arrangement plainly: the price and the availability belong to the other party, and they can change both without asking you.
Three things follow, and none of them are expensive.
Write the dependencies down. A client should be able to see, on a single page, every external service their site relies on, what it costs today, and what stops working if it disappears. Most clients have never been shown that list. It takes about an hour to produce, and it is the document that makes every later conversation possible.
Keep each integration behind a thin layer of your own code. If the payment provider, the mail service or the map is called from forty places, replacing it is a rebuild. If it is called from one small module you wrote yourself, replacing it is a week of work. The discipline costs a few hours at the start and pays on the day you need it.
Assume the notice period is short. Apollo has had roughly ten weeks, and the actual figure has been public for only the last four of them. So when we sign a client up to a third-party service, the useful question is not whether it will ever be repriced. It is whether the business could absorb a switch on ten weeks' notice. If the answer is no, that dependency needs either a contract with real terms behind it, or a written plan B prepared before anyone needs it.
One more thing, less comfortable. Do not plan on user protest as leverage. A coordinated blackout across thousands of large communities is, so far, being absorbed rather than answered.
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