I’ve told the short version of this before: Reddit changed its API pricing in 2023, a generation of third-party apps died overnight, and Redinfinite — my own scroller — went with them. I mentioned Apollo and RIF in passing, one sentence, and moved on to the technical story of the rebuild. I never actually told the part that mattered more: what it was like losing the apps I used every single day, and why it took me over a year to do anything about it.
What I Actually Lost
I wasn’t a casual Reddit user before 2023. I had a specific daily rhythm built entirely around third-party apps — a particular gesture-based navigation I’d used for years, a specific way of filtering what showed up in my feed, a reading experience that had nothing to do with what Reddit’s own app was doing. That rhythm didn’t survive the shutdown week. Apollo went first. RIF followed close behind. Within days, the specific way I’d interacted with Reddit for years just wasn’t available anymore, from anyone.
The Year I Didn’t Fix It
Here’s the part I’ve never actually written: I didn’t rebuild anything right away. I used the official app for over a year, and it was fine, technically. It worked. It also felt like being managed the entire time — recommendation prompts, engagement-optimized feed ordering, “join this community” nudges that showed up constantly. I kept using it anyway, the way you keep using a worse version of something because rebuilding the better version feels like a bigger project than it probably is.
I told myself a few different stories during that year. That I didn’t have time. That the API situation would probably change back, eventually, and building something now would be wasted effort. That the official app was “good enough” and I was being precious about a UI preference that didn’t actually matter. None of those were really the reason. The actual reason was that losing something you used daily doesn’t usually announce itself as a problem worth solving — it just becomes the new normal, quietly, and you stop noticing you’re irritated by it because you’ve adapted.
What Actually Changed
Nothing dramatic. I didn’t have a single moment where I decided to rebuild. What happened was slower and less interesting than that: the low-grade irritation of the official app’s UI kept accumulating, one annoying prompt at a time, until one weekend I had some free time and thought, mostly out of curiosity, about whether the public API tier could actually support the thing I used to have. It could. I built the first working version of what became the current Redinfinite in about a week, mostly because the actual technical problem turned out to be smaller than the year of not attempting it had made it feel.
Why This Part of the Story Actually Matters
The technical story — what API tier v2 uses, what’s different in the rebuild — is useful if you’re trying to understand how the product works. This part is the more honest answer to why it exists at all: not because I identified a market gap or spotted an opportunity, but because I personally missed something I used to have every day, tolerated a worse version of it for over a year, and eventually got annoyed enough to fix it for myself. Redinfinite’s whole reason for existing is that specific, unglamorous kind of motivation — not a business plan, just someone who wanted their old daily habit back.
