Reddit is in hot water as popular third-party client Apollo announces it is shutting down.

Reddit announced it would begin charging for access to its API, but the company initially assured users and developers it had no interest in following Twitter’s example, charging exorbitant prices for licensing. Once the company officially announced its pricing, however, Apollo developer posted a breakdown of the pricing, revealing API access would cost him $20 million per year under the new plan, warning it would force him to shut down his app.

Reddit’s plans have angered users, with many subreddits planning to go dark from June 12 to June 14 in protest. Others are planning to close permanently. In the meantime, Apollo’s developer has announced the app will shut down June 30. In his post detailing his decision, Christian Selig says Reddit has gone so far as to falsely accuse him of trying to blackmail the company:

The admission that you mistook me, and the four subsequent apologies led me to believe that you acknowledged you mistook me and you were apologetic. The fact that you’re pretending none of this happened (or was recorded), and instead espousing a different reality where instead of apologizing for taking it as a threat, you’re instead going the complete opposite direction and saying “He threatened us!” is so low I almost don’t believe it.

Interestingly, since Canada only requires one-person consent to record a call, Selig recorded his conversations with Reddit and has made them available to anyone interested in listening. Selig says Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has also rebuffed any efforts on his part to have a conversation and work out an equitable arrangement.

What’s more, Selig broke down the number of API calls his app makes, since Reddit had accused Apollo of not being API-efficient. Selig addressed that accusation with hard numbers, showing that Apollo is much more efficient than Reddit claims.

Up until a week ago, the stated Reddit API rate limits that apps were asked to operate within was 60 requests per minute per user. That works out to a total of 86,400 per day. Reddit stated that Apollo uses 345 requests per user per day on average, which is also in line with my findings. Thats 0.4% of the limit Reddit was previously imposing, which I would say is quite efficient.

As an analogy (can you tell I love analogies?), to scale the numbers, if I was to borrow my friend’s car and he said “Please don’t drive it more than 864 miles” and I returned the car with 3.4 miles driven, I think he’d be pretty happy with my low use. The fact that a different friend one week only used 1 mile is really cool, but I don’t think either person is “inefficient”.

Despite the pushback, Redding seems hell-bent on proceeding with its plans. Unfortunately for the company, the repercussions of its decisions go far beyond simply killing off a popular app. The official Reddit client is notoriously bad, compared to third-party options. Because Reddit uses almost entirely on volunteer moderators, however, many of them rely on third-party clients to provide the features they need to effectively moderate.

The real question is whether Reddit will survive the turmoil, or whether it will go the way of so many other platforms that charged ahead with unpopular options, only to lose their user base and fade into obscurity.