Reddit Data Scraper: Posts, Comments, Users, Monitoring

Scrape Reddit as clean JSON: subreddit feeds (hot / new / top / rising), full comment threads, keyword search, and — the part most scrapers get wrong — user post & comment history and date-range filtering. HTTP-level, no browser: no page rendering, no scroll timeouts, no browser-crash class of failures. Built-in polite pacing that Reddit tolerates, measured before a single line of this Actor was written.

What you get

The dataset contains two kinds of item, tagged by a type field: posts and comments. Comments link back to their post via postId, and to their parent comment via parentId, so you can rebuild the whole thread tree.

Post:

{
  "type": "post",
  "id": "1mk2qwe",
  "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive",
  "author": "curious_user",
  "title": "ELI5: Why does ice float on water?",
  "score": 1543,
  "numComments": 214,
  "url": "https://i.redd.it/example.jpg",
  "permalink": "https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mk2qwe/eli5_why_does_ice_float_on_water/",
  "domain": "i.redd.it",
  "createdUtc": "2026-08-07T14:32:05.000Z",
  "nsfw": false,
  "spoiler": false,
  "stickied": false,
  "flair": "Physics"
}

selfText (the full body of a text post) is included when the post is fetched via its comment page — feed rows on Reddit do not carry the body, and we do not pretend they do. Posts coming from search results carry a leaner field set (no nsfw/spoiler/stickied/domain), because Reddit's search markup simply does not include them.

Comment:

{
  "type": "comment",
  "id": "n8x1abc",
  "postId": "1mk2qwe",
  "subreddit": "explainlikeimfive",
  "author": "helpful_redditor",
  "score": 87,
  "body": "Water is one of the few substances that expands when it freezes...",
  "createdUtc": "2026-08-07T15:01:44.000Z",
  "permalink": "https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mk2qwe/eli5_why_does_ice_float_on_water/n8x1abc/",
  "depth": 2,
  "parentId": "t1_n8wzdef"
}

Two honesty details worth knowing before you buy:

• When Reddit hides a comment's score, score is absent — we do not substitute a fake 0.
• Deleted authors come through as [deleted], exactly as Reddit shows them.

What it can scrape

Mode	Input	What comes out
Subreddit feeds	subreddits + listingSort (hot/new/top/rising)	Posts, paginated up to Reddit's own ~1,000-post feed ceiling
Comment threads	a post URL in startUrls	The post itself (with selfText) plus its comment tree with depths and parent links
Search	searches, optionally scoped with searchCommunityName	Matching posts, newest first — global or within one subreddit
User history	users	The user's public posts and comments, mixed, paginated
Monitoring	any of the above on an Apify Schedule	Frequent small runs cost exactly what they scrape — there is no per-run start fee

Date filters (postedAfter / postedBefore for posts, commentedAfter / commentedBefore for comments) apply to every mode.

Use cases

• Brand & keyword monitoring. Run a search or a subreddit feed on a schedule. Because billing has no start fee, a 25-post check costs 25 × $0.0019 = $0.0475 — every time, with no per-run surcharge. Many scrapers in this niche charge a start fee per run (sometimes multiplied by memory GB), which quietly dominates the bill in exactly this scenario.
• User research. Pull a redditor's public post and comment history in one run — a mode that is notoriously unreliable across this niche.
• Period analysis & backtesting. postedAfter + postedBefore give you a real date window, not just Reddit's "past week / past month" presets.
• Community research. Feed sorts (hot/new/top/rising) with time filters, NSFW filtering off by default and flair captured per post.
• LLM & dataset building. Clean, typed JSON with stable ids, ISO timestamps and thread structure (postId, parentId, depth) — ready to reassemble into conversation trees.

Input

Field	Type	Description
startUrls	array	Reddit URLs of any supported kind: subreddit feed, post, user page, or search page. Mode is detected from each URL.
subreddits	string[]	Subreddit names without r/, e.g. ["programming"].
listingSort	string	hot (default), new, top, rising.
time	string	Time window for top listings and search: hour, day, week, month, year, all (default).
searches	string[]	Search queries. Alias: searchTerms — inputs written for other popular Reddit scrapers work unchanged.
searchCommunityName	string	Restrict search to one subreddit. Alias: withinCommunity.
users	string[]	Usernames without u/ — scrapes their public post/comment history.
postedAfter / postedBefore	string	ISO date bounds for posts. Applied after fetching (see Limits).
commentedAfter / commentedBefore	string	ISO date bounds for comments.
includeNSFW	boolean	Default false — NSFW posts are skipped unless you opt in.
maxItems	integer	Max items per subreddit / search query / user history (default 100, hard cap 1,000 — Reddit's own feed ceiling). Does not limit comment threads: a post URL always delivers the post plus its fetched comment page of up to 500 comments (see Limits).
proxyConfiguration	object	Defaults to Apify residential proxies; keep it that way for stable results.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free / Start on this page.
2. Enter subreddit names, search queries, usernames — or paste Reddit URLs directly into Start URLs (feeds, posts, user pages and search pages are all recognized).
3. Optionally set the sort, the time window, date bounds and Max items.
4. Run it. Posts and comments land in the dataset as separate typed rows; export as JSON, CSV, Excel, or pull them over the API.

To run it on a schedule, use Apify Schedules — this Actor's pricing has no per-run start fee, so scheduled monitoring costs the same per item as one big run. To call it from code, use the Apify API or an official client.

Rate-limit etiquette (built in, with numbers)

This Actor is deliberately polite to Reddit's servers, and the numbers are fixed in code, not left to chance:

• At most 10 requests per minute per IP — a hard 6-second spacing between requests.
• On an HTTP 429, the Actor backs off (3 s, then 6 s, then 9 s), rotates to a fresh proxy session, and retries up to 3 times. It never hammers a throttled endpoint.
• One comment page fetch retrieves up to 500 comments, so large threads cost few requests.

This pacing was measured before release: at 10 requests/minute, 100 consecutive requests completed without a single refusal. The Actor stays inside what Reddit's own throttling tolerates, by design — it imposes no undue burden on the target servers.

Limits (honest)

• ~1,000 posts per feed is Reddit's ceiling, not ours. Reddit serves at most about 1,000 posts for any listing, and no scraper can page past that. maxItems is capped there.
• Date filters do not reduce the number of requests. Reddit has no server-side date-range API, so postedAfter/postedBefore filter items after fetching. When a date bound is set, items whose timestamp cannot be read are dropped rather than guessed.
• Very deep comment branches may be incomplete. A thread is fetched as one page of up to 500 comments (sorted by top); branches Reddit collapses behind "load more comments" are not expanded in this version.
• User-history comments arrive flat. On a profile page Reddit does not expose thread position, so those comments have depth: 0 and no parentId. Comments scraped from a post's own page carry the full tree structure.
• Search rows carry fewer fields than feed rows — Reddit's search markup omits NSFW/spoiler flags and media domains, and we output what is actually there instead of guessing.
• A non-existent subreddit or user fails that task (after retries) rather than silently returning nothing — you will see it in the run log instead of wondering where your data went.
• No login, no captcha solving. The Actor reads only pages Reddit serves publicly to a logged-out visitor. If Reddit answers with a challenge page, the Actor reports an error and retries on a fresh IP — it will fail honestly rather than fabricate data.
• If more than 5% of tasks in a run fail, the run log says so loudly; a run in which every fetch failed is marked failed, not "succeeded with 0 items". (A run whose filters legitimately match nothing — say, a strict date window — still succeeds, with an empty dataset and an empty bill.)

Pricing

Pay-per-event, two events, nothing else:

Event	Rate
post-scraped	$1.90 per 1,000 ($0.0019 each)
comment-scraped	$0.75 per 1,000 ($0.00075 each)
Run start	free — there is no start event

Comments cost less than half a post because they are cheaper to fetch (hundreds arrive on one page) — most competitors bill a comment at the full post price.

What you get for $1: ~526 posts, or ~1,333 comments, or any mix. Platform usage (compute, proxy) is charged to us, not to you — the per-item price above is the whole bill. There is no subscription, no minimum charge and no per-gigabyte start fee, so billing is strictly proportional to data delivered: autonomous AI agents can call this Actor through the Apify MCP server and pay per item. Rates shown as of the last README update; the Store page stays authoritative.

FAQ

Do I need a Reddit account or an API key? No. The Actor reads only publicly available pages, never logs in, and does not solve captchas or circumvent access controls.

Why is there no start fee? What's the catch? No catch — it is a deliberate design choice. Start fees (especially per-GB ones) punish the monitoring scenario: frequent small runs. We want scheduled monitoring to be priced exactly like one big run, per item delivered.

Why HTTP-level instead of a browser? Browser-based scrapers render and scroll pages, which makes them slow, expensive and prone to timeouts — timeouts that some vendors' public run statistics show by the tens of thousands per month. Fetching Reddit's server-rendered HTML avoids that entire failure class and keeps the price low.

I'm migrating from another Reddit scraper — do I have to rewrite my input? Probably not. The common field names are accepted directly (searchTerms, withinCommunity), and startUrls takes the same URL-list format other actors use.

Can I get every comment of a huge thread? Up to 500 comments per thread page, with full tree structure. Branches Reddit hides behind "load more comments" are not expanded in this version — if you need exhaustive multi-thousand comment threads, this Actor will give you the top 500 by rank, honestly labeled as such.

Are NSFW posts included? Only if you set includeNSFW: true. The default is off.

Where is my data stored? In your run's dataset on your Apify account, under your control. The Actor keeps no copy of scraped data outside your run and sends nothing to any third party.

Other Actors by ActorForge

• Lazada Reviews Scraper — product reviews, per-aspect ratings and buyer media from all six Lazada marketplaces.
• Wildberries Scraper — products, prices and reviews from Wildberries as clean, schema-validated JSON.
• Avito Real Estate Scraper — full property inventory from Avito with freshness stamps.

Missing a Reddit surface you need? Open an issue from the Actor's page and tell us.

Legal

This is an unofficial scraper. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Reddit, Inc. in any way, and it does not use Reddit's developer API. It reads only pages that Reddit serves publicly to any logged-out visitor — no login, no credentials, no captcha solving, no circumvention of access controls. Website terms of service are a contractual matter between a website and its visitors, not criminal law; you are responsible for ensuring that your use of the collected data complies with the laws that apply to you and with Reddit's terms. Post and comment content belongs to its authors.

Personal data

Reddit is a pseudonymous platform: the author field contains the public username a person chose to publish under, not their real identity. This Actor collects no emails, no real names, no private messages, and performs no deanonymization — it stores exactly what any visitor sees on a public page. Scraped data lives only in your own Apify dataset and is not retained by us outside your run. If the data you collect contains personal data under the laws of your jurisdiction (for example the GDPR), you act as its controller: it is your responsibility to have a legal basis for processing and to honor data-subject requests, including deletion.

Changelog

See the repository CHANGELOG.md.