Reddit Community Scraper — Subscribers & Hot Posts, No API Key 👥

Read any subreddit and get how big it is and what it is talking about right now — subscribers, weekly active users, and each hot post with its score, comments, author and date.

No login. No API key. No OAuth app. No captcha solving.

Why this exists. Reddit's JSON endpoints return 403 — even from a real browser, and its RSS feed serves roughly one read per minute and carries neither subscriber counts nor votes. A tool that wanted to know how big a community is had to say "proposed, not measured". This measures it.

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What you get — one row per community

{
  "subreddit": "trains",          // exactly as you typed it
  "prefixedName": "r/trains",
  "subscribers": 29614,
  "subscribersText": "29,614",    // what the page displayed — see below
  "weeklyActiveUsers": 288362,    // WEEKLY, not "online now" — see below
  "weeklyContributions": 3370,
  "description": "The Home for all things \"Iron Horse\".",
  "posts": [
    {
      "title": "Darjeeling steam train struggling to climb! [India]",
      "score": 1734,              // null if Reddit hides it — never 0
      "comments": 61,
      "author": "someuser",
      "createdAt": "2026-09-05T18:00:00.000Z",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/comments/…"
    }
  ],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-06T16:00:00.000Z",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/"
}

Who uses this

• Marketers and community teams — how big is this niche, and is it awake?
• Print-on-demand and merch sellers — a community's hot posts are what its members find funny this week, which is the design brief.
• Researchers and trend tools — post titles at volume, with score, comments and dates attached.
• Anyone sizing an audience — subscriber counts across many communities in one run.

Input

{ "subreddits": ["trains", "r/birding", "https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/"], "postsPerSub": 25 }

Field	Default	Notes
subreddits	—	Required. Accepts trains, r/trains or the full URL. Up to 40 per run.
postsPerSub	25	The front page loads about 25 and pages from there. Max 100.
proxyConfiguration	RESIDENTIAL	Required in practice — see FAQ.

Pricing

$0.002 per community — $2.00 per 1,000, posts included.

A community that came back blocked or empty produces no row and costs nothing. You pay for communities read, not for attempts.

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What it does NOT do, on purpose

• It never invents a zero. A score Reddit did not publish comes back null, not 0 — and Reddit deliberately obscures the score on new posts, so a zero would be a lie about a post that may be doing fine.
• It reports weeklyActiveUsers, not "active users". Reddit publishes a weekly figure; the old "830 here now" counter is not on the page at all. A weekly number under a name that reads as instantaneous is a factor of a thousand presented as the same data. The field name says what it is.
• It keeps the subscriber count as displayed, too. Large communities render 1.2M, which is 1,200,000 rounded — somewhere between 1.15 and 1.25 million. subscribersText carries what the page actually said, so nobody reads a rounded number as an exact one.
• It never truncates a title. On Reddit the title is the post.
• It never normalizes your input. r/AskHistorians comes back as AskHistorians, capitals intact.
• It tells "private" apart from "blocked". One is a fact about the community; the other is a fact about us. The run summary names which.
• It never returns a short list when it was blocked. If Reddit turned away every community, the run ends red with nothing pushed.

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FAQ

Do I need a Reddit account, API key or OAuth app?

No. And an account would not help: measured 6 Sep 2026, the JSON endpoints return 403 from a real browser too.

surface	signed out
www.reddit.com/r/trains/hot.json	🔴 403 "blocked by network security"
www.reddit.com/r/trains/about.json	🔴 403
old.reddit.com/r/trains/	302
www.reddit.com/r/trains/.rss	200, but ~one read per minute, and no subscribers or votes
www.reddit.com/r/trains/	✅ renders, 49 posts after scrolling

The community page publishes everything in attributes on its own web components — post-title, score, comment-count, created-timestamp, weekly-active-users — so nothing is parsed out of rendered text except the subscriber count, which Reddit only draws.

Do I need a proxy?

Yes, and this is the one place where it is not optional. Measured 6 Sep 2026:

from	result
Apify's datacenter IP, no proxy	🔴 403 on every request
RESIDENTIAL proxy	✅ both communities read

Reddit blocks datacenter ranges outright — the same posture that has its JSON endpoints returning 403 to a real browser. It is on by default; leave it on unless you are running from an address you know Reddit accepts.

Why only one community at a time?

Reddit's RSS serves about one read per minute. The page tolerates more, but running in parallel against a site that already blocks is the fastest way to make it block this too.

What if a community is private or does not exist?

It produces no row, and the run summary names it with the reason — private, not-found, no-posts or blocked. A community you could not read is not a community with nothing in it.

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Output

• Dataset — one row per community, with its posts nested.
• Key-value store OUTPUT — the run summary, including which communities produced nothing and why, named rather than merely counted.

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