Good news: Postpone will continue to operate after Reddit’s API changes

I’ll get right to it: despite Reddit’s new API terms and pricing, Postpone will continue to operate in all subreddits beyond July 1, 2023.

What’s going on?

As you’ve likely seen by now, Reddit is making a series of unpopular changes to their API, the tool apps and websites use to interact with Reddit. These changes include:

1. Charging a large amount of money for their API.

2. Not allowing apps to display ads.

3. Removing NSFW content and subreddits.

In short, these changes reduce app revenue, increase app expenses, and make app’s worse and non-competitive with Reddit’s official mobile app—all at the same time. As we’ll see in the coming days, whether Reddit intends to kill third party clients or not, the result of their actions will be the death of beloved third party clients like Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and more.

Postpone stands in complete solidarity with these app developers. 🫡

The Impact on Postpone

However, unless Reddit announces further changes, we do not anticipate the API changes will impact Postpone, and Postpone will continue to operate as it does today beyond July 1, 2023.

On the API price

First, Postpone can pay the API cost. Popular third party Reddit apps make billions of requests to Reddit each month and will receive huge bills from Reddit, such as $20 million per year. 

Postpone makes significantly fewer requests and will have a much smaller bill that is within our budget.

On NSFW subreddits and content

Second, Reddit recently clarified that their changes to NSFW content only impact third party mobile apps that display NSFW content to users. Since Postpone is a web app and not a Reddit client, these changes won’t impact Postpone. Postpone will continue to submit content to and retrieve analytics data from NSFW subreddits for NSFW creators.

Reddit also clarified that NSFW is not in jeopardy on Reddit, and that these changes have “no implications for the future of NSFW on Reddit.”

On ads

Finally, Postpone does not display ads to users, so the change where Reddit disallows displaying ads does not impact Postpone.

Conclusion

I’m personally disappointed in the changes Reddit is making. I’ve used third party Reddit apps for over a decade, from Alien Blue back in the day to Apollo today. Third party apps are a core feature of Reddit to me, and I know my personal Reddit usage will be reduced if they no longer exist.

And yet, Postpone will continue to serve our customers despite the changes Reddit is making. If you have any questions or comments then don’t hesitate to reach out via email or the chat bubble in the bottom-right of Postpone.

Cheers,

Grant, Creator of Postpone