Reddit Data Scraper: Posts, Comments, Users, Monitoring

Scrape Reddit as clean JSON: subreddit feeds (hot, new, top, rising), posts with their comments, keyword search, and the two things most scrapers get wrong: user post and comment history and date-range filtering. It reads the same public pages Reddit serves to a logged-out visitor's browser, over plain HTTP with no page rendering and no scrolling, at a fixed pace that stays inside the request quota Reddit itself announces for these pages.

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 comments from a post page link to their parent comment via parentId, so you can rebuild the 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://www.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 body of a text post, as plain text) comes with feed rows, user history rows and the post's own page. For link posts url is the external link. For text posts it is omitted rather than filled with the post's own address. Search rows are lighter, see Limits.

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://www.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 feed ceiling of about 1,000 posts
Posts with comments	a post URL in startUrls	The post itself (with selfText) plus the comments Reddit shows on the post page, with depths and parent links (see Limits)
Search	searches, optionally scoped with searchCommunityName	Matching posts, newest first, global or within one subreddit, up to about 400 per query
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 and keyword monitoring. Run a search or a subreddit feed on a schedule. Because billing has no start fee, a 25-post check costs 25 posts at $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 and backtesting. postedAfter + postedBefore give you a real date window, not just Reddit's "past week" or "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 and 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 (www.reddit.com and old.reddit.com links both work). 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, so 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 and 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 or user history (default 100, hard cap 1,000, about Reddit's own feed ceiling). A feed or profile request returns about 25 items and a search request about 7, so 1,000 feed posts take about 42 requests. Paging stops after 60 pages per source, so a search query gives at most about 400 posts. Does not limit post URLs: a post URL always delivers the post plus the comments shown on its page.
onlyNew	boolean	Default false. When on, each run skips items this Actor already gave you from the same sources in earlier runs, so they are not saved or charged again. See Only new since last run.
proxyConfiguration	object	Defaults to Apify residential proxies with no country pin, which is the supported configuration.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free or Start on this page.
2. Enter subreddit names, search queries or 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 them as JSON, CSV or 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.

Only new since last run

Turn on Only new since last run (onlyNew: true) for scheduled monitoring. Here "new" means "not delivered to you before from the same source", not "newer by time": on a hot or top feed an older post you have not received yet still counts as new.

• Items you already got from a source are not written to the dataset and not charged. A post that shows up in two of your sources (say a crosspost, or a feed plus its direct URL) can still come once per source.
• maxItems counts new items only. Paging stops at the first page where every item was already delivered to you, and never goes past 60 pages per source, the same ceiling as without the flag. A quiet source costs one request and no item charges.
• The list of delivered items lives in a named key-value store in your own Apify account, called reddit-only-new- plus a code made from your sources (the run log shows the exact name). Each set of sources (subreddits with their sort and time window, searches, users, URLs) gets its own store, so adding or removing a source starts a fresh list for the whole set. Filters (dates, NSFW, maxItems) do not. The store does not expire. The latest 2,000 items per source are remembered.
• The list is saved once, at the end of the run. If a run is aborted or times out, the list stays as it was, so the next run delivers again what that run had delivered, rather than losing it. For the same reason, do not let two runs with the same input overlap.
• If your max cost limit stops a run, items it saved but could not charge come again next time.
• To start over, delete that store in Apify Console under Storage, Key-value stores.

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 20 requests per minute, with a hard 3-second spacing between requests. Reddit announces a quota of 225 requests per 10 minutes for these pages in its x-ratelimit-* headers. A 3-second spacing means at most 200 requests per 10 minutes, so the Actor stays inside that quota by design.
• A feed or profile request carries about 25 items, a search request about 7 posts, and a post page carries the post with its first comments. A 1,000-post feed is about 42 requests, roughly two minutes.
• On an HTTP 429 the Actor waits 30 seconds, opens a fresh session and retries. On any other transient refusal it backs off (3 s, then 6 s, then 9 s), rotates to a fresh proxy session and retries, at most 3 times. A post that does not exist (HTTP 404) is not retried at all: the task fails immediately with the reason in the log.
• If five tasks in a row (a source, or one page of it) fail after all retries, the run stops instead of grinding through the rest of the plan.

The Actor stays inside what Reddit's own throttling tolerates, by design, and imposes no undue burden on the target servers.

Limits (honest)

• About 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.
• A post URL gives the comments shown on the post page, not the whole thread. That is about 25 comments: in a big thread the top 25, in a smaller one fewer top comments together with the replies Reddit shows under them. Comments Reddit loads only when you click "more replies" or scroll further are not fetched in this version.
• Search rows are lighter than feed rows. Reddit's search page shows no post body and no link target, so search rows have no selfText, url, domain or flair. Scrape the subreddit feed or the post URL when you need those.
• Text comes as plain text. Post and comment bodies keep their paragraphs, list items and code blocks, but not formatting such as bold, italics or link targets.
• User-history comments arrive flat. A profile shows neither the thread position nor the parent of a comment, so those comments have depth: 0 and no parentId. postId is still filled in. Comments scraped from a post's own page carry the tree structure.
• Date filters do not reduce the number of requests. Reddit has no server-side date-range filter, so postedAfter/postedBefore filter items after fetching. When a date bound is set, items whose timestamp cannot be read are dropped rather than guessed.
• A subreddit or user that does not exist, or is banned, gives an empty result. Reddit serves such pages as ordinary pages with no posts, so that source ends with 0 items and no charge, not with an error. Check the spelling if a source comes back empty.
• No login, no captcha solving. The Actor reads only what Reddit serves to any logged-out visitor. It opens a session the way a browser does, completes Reddit's lightweight automated visitor check (a short script every visitor's browser runs), and then reads public pages with that session. If the check ever changes shape, feeds, search and profiles keep working through a lighter page that needs no check, while post pages may fail until the Actor is updated. If Reddit refuses a session, the Actor opens a new one from a fresh address. It fails 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

A comment costs less than half a post, while most competitors bill a comment at the full post price.

What you get for $1: about 526 posts, or about 1,333 comments, or any mix. Platform usage (compute, proxy) is charged to us, not to you, so 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 are 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 data as a logged-out visitor, never logs in, and does not use Reddit's developer API or anyone's credentials.

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.

Does it use a browser? Not for the data. Pages are fetched over plain HTTP and read straight from the HTML Reddit serves, with no rendering and no scrolling. That keeps it fast, cheap and free of the render-and-scroll timeouts that browser-based scrapers show by the tens of thousands per month in their public run statistics. A real Chrome is kept on standby only as a last resort for opening a session, when no page gives one over plain HTTP.

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? Not in this version. A post URL gives the post and the comments Reddit shows on the post page: about 25 comments with their full tree position (in a big thread, the top 25). Comments Reddit loads only on "more replies" or on scroll are not fetched.

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. With Only new since last run on, it also keeps the ids of items it already gave you in a key-value store in your account (see above), so you can delete them at any time.

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 data that Reddit serves publicly to any logged-out visitor: no login, no credentials, no captcha solving. 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.