Reddit Pain Point Finder

Find Reddit threads where people complain, compare tools, ask for recommendations, or show buying intent around your keywords.

Use it for SaaS idea validation, product research, ICP research, social listening, competitor monitoring, and voice-of-customer datasets. Give it keywords like alternative to intercom, best crm for freelancers, or stripe fees, and it returns ranked Reddit posts with complaint/recommendation/buying-intent signals.

What it extracts

• Reddit posts matching your keywords, optionally limited to specific subreddits
• Top-level comments from each post
• Complaint, recommendation request, question, and buying intent signals
• Engagement metrics such as score, upvote ratio, and comment count
• A simple opportunity score so the most useful threads rise to the top

Common workflows

Validate a SaaS idea

Search the category before building. Look for repeated complaints, pricing frustration, migration pain, and people asking for alternatives.

Example queries:

[
  "alternative to intercom",
  "stripe fees too high",
  "best crm for freelancers"
]

Find buyer-intent threads

Monitor keywords where people are already looking for a tool, comparing competitors, or asking for recommendations.

Build voice-of-customer datasets

Export raw customer language from Reddit into a dataset for positioning, landing pages, support docs, or LLM/RAG workflows.

Output fields

Each dataset item includes:

• query, subreddit, postId, title, text
• url, redditUrl, author, createdAt
• score, upvoteRatio, numComments, flair
• isQuestion, isComplaint, isRecommendationRequest, isBuyingIntent
• matchedSignals, topComments, opportunityScore

Top comments include id, author, body, score, createdAt, and permalink.

Input example

{
  "searchQueries": [
    "alternatives to apollo",
    "best crm for freelancers",
    "stripe fees"
  ],
  "subreddits": [
    "SaaS",
    "Entrepreneur",
    "smallbusiness"
  ],
  "sort": "relevance",
  "time": "month",
  "maxPostsPerQuery": 50,
  "includeComments": true,
  "maxCommentsPerPost": 5,
  "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PublicRedditResearch/1.0)",
  "useApifyProxy": true
}

Leave subreddits empty to search Reddit globally.

Sample output

A typical item looks like this:

{
  "query": "alternative to intercom",
  "subreddit": "SaaS",
  "title": "Looking for an Intercom alternative that does not get expensive so quickly",
  "redditUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/...",
  "score": 42,
  "numComments": 18,
  "isComplaint": true,
  "isRecommendationRequest": true,
  "isBuyingIntent": true,
  "matchedSignals": ["alternative", "too expensive", "recommendation"],
  "opportunityScore": 87
}

Use the raw URLs and exact wording for customer research, positioning, landing page copy, or outreach prompts.

Pricing

Pay per Reddit thread found. Start with a narrow query, review the matches, then scale up. Comments and proxy requests increase runtime, but benchmark runs stay cheap enough for platform usage to be included in the per-thread price.

Notes

This Actor uses public Reddit endpoints without login, browser automation, or paywall bypassing. Reddit often blocks datacenter IPs, so Apify Proxy is enabled by default for reliability. Keep requests targeted; broad searches across many subreddits will naturally run longer.