I want to share something that I think many people here may relate to.
I am devastated.
I understand that Spotify has to respond to the explosion of AI. The rise of AI-generated music has changed everything, and with something like 300,000 new songs now being released on Spotify every single day, I can see why the platform feels pressure to tighten access and protect itself.
But for people like me, the consequences are brutal.
I come from an older generation of tech. I have been a full stack programmer and entrepreneur since the 1980s, back when we were writing assembler and machine code. I have been building things for a very long time. Financially, I am one of the fortunate ones. I sold a site to Spotify six years ago and have succesfully exited multiple businesses in my life, so this is not a story about survival. It is about time, effort, belief, and having something meaningful pulled out from under you just when it is ready.
For the last year and a half, I have been building a website. I built it to strengthen the Spotify playlist community, to fight playlist monetization and payola. It was designed as a completely free platform, with no paywall, no hidden catch, and no monetization trap. Just something useful, carefully made, intended to help people.
This was not some rushed AI-era experiment. It was built slowly, methodically, and seriously. I have spent 18 months working on it, and during development I tested it closely with 25 beta users. They were not passive signups. They actively used the platform, gave feedback, helped shape features, and contributed to making it better. After all that time, the site is finally ready.
And now I cannot move forward.
Almost overnight, the ground shifted. The platform restrictions changed so suddenly that not only can I not launch properly, I cannot even continue serving the 25 beta users who helped me build it because of rate limiting and endpoint restrictions, in development mode. After 18 months of work, the project has been stopped at the exact moment it was supposed to begin.
That is the hardest part.
When you are young, losing 18 months is painful. When you are older, it feels different. Time carries more weight. Eighteen months of my life means a great deal to me now. I do not have the same feeling of endless runway that younger developers do. So when a project you poured yourself into becomes obsolete overnight through no fault of your own, it hits hard.
What makes this especially frustrating is that there should be some kind of path for legitimate developers who were already building before the AI flood. There should be a way to demonstrate that your work is real, that it predates this wave, that it was built in good faith, and that it serves an authentic user need.
How about setting up some type of evaluation council evaluating apps and sites that was started prior to 2026? A path to launch a site that bypasses the redundant 250k MAU requirement, which practically blocks anyone who started a development project in good faith and in awe of Spotify as a platform. I would gladly volunteer for such a council pro bono.Otherwise you are forcing us to dump our site to some fat corporations, who possess an extended rate limit app, at fire-sale price. Not someone who cares about the user experience and who legitimately deserves Spotify's backing.
Right now, it feels as though serious long-term developers are being swept away in the same current as the very problems these new restrictions are meant to solve.
So I am asking: does anyone here know how to proceed in a case like this?
Because I cannot be the only one. I am sure there are many other developers in the same position - people who spent months or years building something real, only to wake up and find that it no longer works, no longer qualifies, and no longer has a future.
Being told to throw 18 months of your life in the trash because the rules changed overnight is a hard thing to accept.
And maybe this thread can inspire more SOB STORIES in this topic. I, for one, would like to hear more. And hopefully someone will listen.
