February 2026 API Changes Killed My First Public Project — Any Path Forward for Indie Developers?

ba1ake — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 07:08:24 GMT

I want to be upfront that this forum is the only real way I have to reach developer support, so I figured I would give it a shot.

I am the solo developer behind DropTrackr, a Discord bot that notified music communities when their favorite artists dropped new releases on Spotify. The first version was built on a flight home from Toronto. It was my first ever public project. With no marketing at all, just a few posts and a Discord bots listing, it grew by word of mouth to 244 servers and 1,400+ tracked artists and podcasts in under 7 months. It was not just fans either. Actual artists and podcasters used it to notify their own communities the moment something dropped.

The bot was engineered carefully to be a responsible API consumer, with rate limit handling, circuit breakers, and a rotation based poller built specifically to avoid hammering the API. This was not a scraper.

The February 2026 changes broke it at the root. GET /browse/new-releases was removed and per artist polling via /artists/{id}/albums triggers 24 hour 429 bans at our scale. Extended Quota requires a registered business and 250k+ MAUs, which is not realistic for a solo indie developer. I looked through the docs and could not find another path. I have already shut down public access.

My sincere question is: is there a lighter or more appropriate endpoint I could be using to detect new releases for specific artists that I may have missed? And is there any path forward at all for small non commercial community tools like this?

It would mean everything to find a way to bring it back.

Thank you for reading.

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February 2026 API Changes Killed My First Public Project — Any Path Forward for Indie Developers?