Reddit API Scraper

Reddit API Scraper extracts posts, comments, search results, subreddit metadata, and user profiles from Reddit — fast, structured, and without a login. It talks directly to Reddit's official OAuth data API (the same endpoints the Reddit mobile app uses), so you get clean JSON instead of brittle HTML scraping. Point it at a subreddit, a search query, a post URL, or a username and download the results as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Running on the Apify platform, you also get scheduling, a REST API, webhook and integration support, proxy rotation, and run monitoring out of the box.

Why use Reddit API Scraper?

• Market & audience research — track what communities are discussing around your product, niche, or competitors.
• Brand & reputation monitoring — surface every mention of a keyword across Reddit and read the full comment threads.
• Content & trend discovery — pull top/hot/rising posts from any subreddit to spot emerging topics.
• Sentiment & NLP datasets — collect large, structured post + comment corpora for analysis or model training.
• Lead and community analysis — profile users and inspect their posting history.

How to use Reddit API Scraper

1. Open the Actor and go to the Input tab.
2. Fill in one or more source fields: Subreddits, Search queries, Post URLs / IDs, or Usernames.
3. Optionally set the sort order, time window, item limits, and whether to include comments.
4. Click Start and watch the run log.
5. When it finishes, open the Output / Storage tab and download your data as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Input

You can combine any of the source types in a single run. At least one is required.

Field	Type	Description
subreddits	array	Subreddit names, r/-prefixed names, or URLs to pull post listings from.
sort	enum	Listing sort: hot, new, top, rising, controversial.
time	enum	Time window for top/controversial: hour–all.
searchQueries	array	Full-text search queries to run.
searchSort	enum	Search sort: relevance, hot, top, new, comments.
searchInSubreddits	boolean	Restrict each search query to the listed subreddits.
postUrls	array	Individual post permalinks/IDs — fetches full self-text + comments.
usernames	array	Users to scrape (profile + history).
userContent	enum	overview, submitted, comments, or about.
includeComments	boolean	Also fetch comment trees for posts collected from subreddits/searches.
maxComments	integer	Max comments emitted per post.
commentSort	enum	Comment sort: confidence, top, new, controversial, old, qa.
maxItemsPerSource	integer	Max posts per subreddit/search/user (0 = unlimited).
includeNsfw	boolean	Include NSFW results in search.
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings (Apify Proxy recommended for larger runs).

Example input

{
    "subreddits": ["programming", "r/python"],
    "sort": "top",
    "time": "week",
    "maxItemsPerSource": 100,
    "includeComments": true,
    "maxComments": 50,
    "searchQueries": ["large language models"],
    "searchSort": "new"
}

Output

Each item is pushed to the dataset with a type field (post, comment, subreddit, or user). You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Example output (a post)

{
    "type": "post",
    "id": "1ukim8j",
    "subreddit": "programming",
    "title": "Open source is a thankless job...",
    "author": "swithek",
    "selftext": "",
    "score": 1092,
    "upvoteRatio": 0.97,
    "numComments": 267,
    "createdAt": "2026-07-01T11:09:38+00:00",
    "url": "https://example.com/article",
    "permalink": "https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1ukim8j/..."
}

Example output (a comment)

{
    "type": "comment",
    "id": "ouw01y8",
    "postId": "1ukim8j",
    "author": "SP-Niemand",
    "body": "As a user, you get to demand exactly nothing...",
    "score": 453,
    "depth": 0,
    "createdAt": "2026-07-01T12:30:00+00:00"
}

Data fields

Field	Applies to	Description
type	all	post, comment, subreddit, or user.
id	all	Base-36 Reddit ID.
subreddit	post, comment	Subreddit name.
title	post, subreddit	Post title / subreddit title.
author	post, comment	Username of the author.
selftext / body	post / comment	Full text content.
score, ups, upvoteRatio	post, comment	Vote metrics.
numComments	post	Comment count.
postId, parentId, depth	comment	Thread position.
subscribers, activeUserCount	subreddit	Community size.
commentKarma, linkKarma, totalKarma	user	Karma breakdown.
createdAt	all	ISO-8601 UTC creation time.
permalink, url	post, comment	Links.

How much does it cost to scrape Reddit?

This Actor uses pay-per-result pricing: $5.00 per 1,000 rows ($0.005 per row). Every item written to the dataset — a post, a comment, a subreddit, or a user — counts as one row. So a run that collects 500 posts and 5,000 comments (5,500 rows) costs about $27.50.

Platform usage (compute + proxy) is billed on top of the per-row price at Apify's standard rates. The Actor is lightweight — it calls a JSON API rather than rendering pages — so compute is minimal; the main variable cost is proxy traffic if you enable Apify Proxy. To control spend, set Max total charge on the run and/or lower maxItemsPerSource and maxComments; the Actor stops as soon as the charge cap is reached. Reddit limits each OAuth token to roughly 100 requests per minute, so very large runs are paced accordingly.

Tips & advanced options

• Fewer requests, faster runs: leave includeComments off if you only need post metadata.
• Targeted comment collection: put specific posts in postUrls — their comments are always fetched.
• Scoped search: enable searchInSubreddits with a subreddits list to search within specific communities.
• Unlimited collection: set maxItemsPerSource to 0 to page through everything the API returns (Reddit typically caps listings around ~1000 items per source).
• Scale past rate limits: run with Apify Proxy and/or split large jobs into scheduled runs.

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

Is scraping Reddit legal? This Actor collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for how you use it — comply with applicable laws (including data-protection law such as GDPR) and avoid collecting personal or sensitive data without a lawful basis.

Limitations: Reddit caps listing pagination (~1000 items per source) and comment trees may be truncated for very large threads. Search uses Reddit's REST search endpoint.

Support: found a bug or need a field that isn't extracted? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab. Custom scraping solutions can also be arranged.