I don't think any of the third part devs are asking for it to be free. The Apollo devs initial response to the announcement was "I'm honestly looking forward to the pricing and the stuff you're rolling out provided it's enough to keep me with a job. You guys seem nothing but reasonable, so I'm looking to finding out more." Then they announced pricing which is 29x the current revenue per user, and are blocking NSFW content from the API anyway.
Latest update from him: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_t...