Recently, Reddit announced that they will be charging for access to their API. While this might bring in money in the short term, they are harming important parts of their eco-system, and some app developers won’t be able to afford API access due to high user numbers. These third party apps are vital to Reddit’s success and turning them away is not a good idea, in my opinion.
I think this presents a golden opportunity for someone to replace Reddit in the social media arena by making a similar offering with a free-to-use API. Reddit’s current competitive moat is a network effect, where you need users to post content, which in turn attracts more users as readers of the site. Getting started is hard when most people routinely turn to the incumbents.
But if apps like Apollo have a large user base and can’t work with Reddit any more, why not work with them for a win-win: offer a free API for existing apps to keep running and tap their users to get started in business. This seems to be the right time for this.