Reddit on new pricing plan: Company 'needs to be fairly paid'

A number of Reddit forums plan to go dark for two days later this month to protest the company’s decision to increase prices for third-party app developers.

One developer, who makes a Reddit Inc. app called Apollo, said that under the new pricing policy he would have to pay Reddit US$20 million a year to continue running the app as-is.

Reddit’s move comes after Twitter Inc. announced in February that the company would no longer support free access to its application programming interface, or API. Twitter instead now offers pricing tiers based on usage.

Reddit spokesman Tim Rathschmidt said the company is trying to clear up confusion about the change on the platform, and stressed that Reddit spends millions on hosting. “Reddit needs to be fairly paid to continue supporting high-usage third-party apps,” Rathschmidt said. “Our pricing is based on usage levels that we measure to be comparable to our own costs.”