Maybe this is a dumb question... but why doesn't Reddit lower its API prices to a point that Apollo and other app developers can afford? Plenty of other companies have figured out how to price APIs in a way that works for developers: AWS, Twilio, Stripe, Okta, MongoDB, and Plaid, to name a few. It's not like these companies aren't making money with their API pricing; they've all generated enough in revenues and profi…
They likely don't want third party apps at all, but this is the method they thought would be more palatable than just coming out and saying that. They want to control the experience end-to-end, like Twitter and Discord.