Fast Reddit Intent Scraper (API Bypass & JSON)

Extract structured Reddit data at lightning speed. Unlike heavy, expensive browser-based scrapers, this Actor utilizes a pure HTTP/Cheerio architecture to pull posts and nested comments in seconds—without the enterprise API fees.

🎯 Why use this Actor?

When Reddit locked down its API, developers and marketers lost access to the best source of unfiltered buying intent on the internet. This scraper bypasses those limits using lightweight HTTP requests and rotating residential proxies.

• Lightning Fast: No headless browsers. Uses native HTTP and DOM parsing for instant extraction.
• Cost-Effective: Because it doesn't burn Playwright/Puppeteer compute, your Apify credits go 10x further.
• Highly Reliable: Built-in automatic retries, proxy rotation, and Rate Limit handling.

🎯 Built-in Intent Detection

Every post and comment is scored against 4 deterministic signal categories — no LLM call, so it's free and instant:

• seeking_recommendation — "looking for", "recommend a", "alternative to", "any suggestions for"
• pain_point — "struggling with", "frustrated with", "sick of"
• switching — "switching from", "cancelled my", "looking to replace"
• comparison — "vs", "which is better", "worth paying for"

Set onlyIntentSignals: true in the input to skip everything that matches zero categories — the output dataset is pre-filtered to actual signal, not a raw post/comment dump you have to filter yourself. Pass your own intentKeywords to match on product names or a specific pain point instead of the defaults.

📊 What Data Do You Get?

The scraper returns clean, structured JSON ready for LLMs, RAG pipelines, or CSV exports.

• intentScore: How many intent categories matched (0 = no signal).
• matchedIntentLabels: Which categories matched (e.g. ["seeking_recommendation"]).
• postTitle: The title of the thread.
• author: The Reddit username.
• textContent: The actual post/comment body (clean text).
• upvotes: Current score.
• commentCount: Total engagement.
• postUrl: Direct link to the content.
• depth & parentId: Perfect for reconstructing nested comment trees in AI training.

💡 Use Cases

• Lead Generation: Set onlyIntentSignals: true and get only the posts/comments where someone is actively asking for a solution your product provides.
• Social Listening: Track brand mentions and competitor complaints (e.g., "alternative to [competitor]") with the switching and comparison signals.
• AI Training Data: Feed clean, scored JSON directly into your LLM or RAG pipeline without HTML bloat.

⚡ Pricing

• Pay Per Event: You only pay for successful extractions.