Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.
Create post -> share url -> instant chatroom based around the topic -> live chat with anyone on the net in seconds (hopefully have fun). Open to feedback :)
This is their real motivation. You can’t fight that honestly. Greed is good for these folks.
Now with Reddit trying to shutdown Apollo and other 3rd party clients with this pricing move I can see myself never using Reddit, their official client sucks a lot (it's unfortunate they bought Alien Blue just to kill it, which gave Apollo the chance to rise from those ashes), if Apollo dies... I will simply not use Reddit as much, the only other way I can use Reddit right now is through old.reddit.com, that sucks on mobile browsers without RES.
It seems I will soon experience a repeat of Digg with Reddit, slowly use it less and less because the experience is broken until the moment I forget it exists.
I have no idea what is out there as an alternative at this point, there just seems to be too much chaff everywhere.
Pretty much all alternatives I looked at lacked community. Not expecting reddit numbers, but even a threshold as simple as "more than 5 posts/20 comments a day" was a huge hurdle here. Social media is just so centralized now.