Oh Boy! It’s been a heck of a month at Reddit. Recently they’ve announced a set of API pricing changes that are sure to destroy many popular moderation tools, bots, third-party clients, and other tools used by thousands of subreddits.

Citing increasing costs and maintenance, Reddit wants to tax API access to a point where no developer would be able to afford it and that would essentially run into the ground popular moderator tools, bots, and third-party clients such as Apollo.

What happened with Reddit and Apollo?

Reddit announced updates to the API on April 18. Among the changes is a shift to a subscription model for third-party apps. The team behind Apollo, a very popular third-party Reddit client for iOS, soon began receiving phone calls, but the price—the crucial component in an announcement to switch to a paid API—was conspicuously absent, with the promise that it will be discussed again in two to four weeks.

Reddit’s reasoning for moving to a paid API was that they cannot continue to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (fair enough, I guess), and they are seeking to implement fair pricing based on reality.

Reddit made sure to insist they did not aspire to be like Twitter, whose API price was so exorbitant that it was widely mocked in all major publications (Thanks, Musk…).

Why is Apollo for Reddit shutting down?

Six weeks later, Reddit contacted the Apollo developers to discuss pricing. The developer created a small app where they could input the prices and it would output monthly/annual cost, cost for free users, cost for paying users, etc. to be able to easily figure out how much money would Apollo cost to run under the new API prices.

Reddit quoted $0.24 for a thousand API requests. The Apollo developer quickly figured out it would cost upwards of $2 million per month, or more than $20 million per year to run Apollo now.

With this news in mind, many mod tools developers, bot creators, moderators, and Reddit users decided to protest the API changes by locking down the sub-reddits and preventing new posts from being made until Reddit rethinks its position.

Following the protest, a leaked internal memo from Reddit’s CEO suggests they were aware of these protests and decided to wait for them to blow over. Failing that, Reddit started threatening moderators who private their subs with demotion (removing the mods and adding new ones who would keep the sub open).

Not much has changed since, and on June 30th, 2023, Apollo officially shut down as the developers have no way to offset the huge cost.

How to revive Apollo on iOS by using your own API key?

About 15 hours ago, a brand new jailbreak tweak called ApolloAPI was released for free on the Havoc Repo by developer ryannair05. This tweak allows you to set your own API key for Apollo so that you can continue to use it indefinitely. ApolloAPI tweak is completely open-source on GitHub. The tweak supports iOS 15.0 up to iOS 16.5 and works on rootless jailbreaks.

This is possible because you as a sole user do not generate too many API requests so you can use your own key, but this would not be feasible at a large scale with just Apollo’s own key.

How to install the ApolloAPI tweak?

1. Add the Havoc Repo source if you don’t have it already. It’s https://havoc.app/
2. Search for ApolloAPI
3. Press the Install button.

How to configure your own API Key for Apollo on iOS?

1. Navigate to reddit.com and log into your account.
2. Then navigate to this link https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps
3. Press the “are you a developer? Create an app…” button.
4. Complete the form as follows:

• Name: You can write anything here.
• Choose the “Installed app” option.
• Description: You can write anything here.
• About URL: You can write anything here.
• Redirect URL: apollo://reddit-oauth

Now click “Create App“.

Important: After you press “Create App” you will get a new client identifier key which is a bunch of characters. Copy that key and paste it into the ApolloAPI tweak!

After you add the key to the ApolloAPI tweak, all you have to do is open Apollo, log out of all accounts, and then log back in. It should now work.

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