- Company — Apollo (Christian Selig, solo developer)
- Sector — Consumer mobile app / third-party client
- Founded / Died — 2014 / 30 June 2023
- Lifespan — ~9 years
- Capital raised — Bootstrapped. No outside investment at any point.
- Peak scale — ~1.5 million monthly active users; ~50,000 paying subscribers at shutdown, per Selig's own disclosure. He described the business as supporting him full-time and comfortably.
- What it built — A high-quality iOS client for Reddit, sold as a one-off purchase and later a subscription, built by one person.
- Stated cause of death — Selig said Reddit's new API pricing — which he calculated at roughly $20 million per year for Apollo's call volume, based on Reddit's quoted $0.24 per 1,000 API calls — made the app impossible to operate. He published his call-volume data and the full text of his calls with Reddit, including a recording, after Reddit's CEO publicly characterised him as having made a threat (Selig's shutdown post on r/apolloapp, 8 June 2023; reported in TechCrunch).
- Evidenced cause — Agree, and one of very few cases where the founder's account is fully corroborated by primary evidence he published himself. Reddit announced the pricing in April–May 2023 with a 30-day window; Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Sync and BaconReader all closed within weeks. A platform owner unilaterally repriced the only input the business had.
- Warning signs visible earlier — Reddit had signalled an IPO for years, and API monetisation is the standard pre-IPO move (Twitter did the same in January 2023, five months earlier — see entries 10 and 11). The warning sign was structural, not situational: 100% of revenue depended on a free API from a company that had no contract with him.
- Money outcome — Selig refunded subscribers out of his own pocket, an amount he estimated at ~$250,000, which Apple later helped defray. He kept the business's prior earnings. No investors to lose money. He has since shipped other independent apps.
- Post-mortem quality — Very high and evidence-first. Rather than an essay, he published call recordings, transcripts, and his own API-cost arithmetic. Not self-serving — it is largely documentary. He explicitly declined to blame Reddit employees individually.
- Transferable lesson — This is as close to "not your fault" as this library gets, and it still carries a lesson: a business built entirely on another company's free API has an implicit termination clause it did not negotiate. That is a known, priceable risk, and the correct response is not to avoid it but to hold less of your life in it.
- Sources — TechCrunch · AppleInsider · BetaKit
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