No one was saying reddit couldn’t implement API costs. In fact, every major 3rd party app developer, including Apollo, supporting reddit charging for API access and made suggestions on how such an arrangement could be made that was fair and reasonable to all parties. However, Reddit’s CEO said fuck that and wanted to charge an insane amount of money for API usage that no 3rd party developers would be able to reasonably afford without asking for an exorbitant amount of money from their users.