By Nikhil Kumar. Last updated August 2026.
Reddit’s API was free for fifteen years. Then, in one announcement, it stopped being free for almost everyone who was actually using it.
The Reddit API costs $0.24 per 1,000 API calls for commercial access above the free tier, a rate that took effect on July 1, 2023, according to TechCrunch. There is a free tier of 100 queries per minute with OAuth. For a small, non-commercial project that stays inside that limit, the Reddit API is still free. For anything commercial or high-volume, you are now metered, gated behind approval, or better off with a data API.
You are not the only one confused by it. “reddit api” draws about 5,400 US searches a month and “reddit api pricing” another 480, according to DataforSEO keyword data pulled in August 2026. The pricing is split across a free tier, a metered rate, and a gated commercial tier, and no single page lays all three out plainly.
How much does the Reddit API cost?
Reddit charges $0.24 per 1,000 API calls for commercial access above its free tier, effective July 1, 2023. Below that sits a free tier of 100 queries per minute per OAuth client. High-volume commercial access is negotiated behind an approval step, with CNBC reporting a rough $12,000-per-year minimum. So the price depends entirely on which of those three buckets you land in.
The number that matters is the metered rate: $0.24 per 1,000 calls. It sounds tiny. It is not, once you multiply it by real collection volume, which I do further down.
One thing the pricing pages bury: the metered rate is per API call, not per post or comment. A single call returns a limited page of results, so pulling a lot of data means a lot of calls.
Is the Reddit API still free, and for how long?
The Reddit API is free up to 100 queries per minute per OAuth client, and it stays free for accessibility apps, moderation tools, and academic researchers. That is 144,000 calls a day per client, which is plenty for a hobby project, a bot, or a small dashboard. You outgrow it the moment you need bulk historical data, many subreddits at once, or a commercial product.
Reddit’s own Data API terms keep the free tier for non-commercial use. So a student, a moderator, or a solo dev building a tool for one community pays nothing.
The catch is the ceiling. 100 queries per minute is a rate limit, not a volume plan. If you need to pull five years of comments from a busy subreddit, you are not blocked by cost first, you are blocked by throughput. And the second your use looks commercial, you need approval and the meter starts.
For a lot of teams, that free tier is genuinely enough. If yours is one of them, register an app, use a wrapper, and stop reading. The rest of this is for everyone who has already hit the wall.
Why did Reddit start charging for its API?
Reddit started charging in 2023 to stop AI companies from training on its data for free, and to squeeze revenue before its IPO. The API had been free since 2008. When Reddit announced the change in April 2023, CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times that companies were scraping Reddit to build large language models and giving nothing back. The blast radius was the third-party app ecosystem.
The clearest casualty was Apollo. Its developer, Christian Selig, was quoted about $12,000 for 50 million requests, which projected to roughly $20 million a year, per TechCrunch. Apollo’s revenue was around $500,000 a year. The math was not close.
The protest was enormous. In June 2023, more than 7,000 subreddits went private or restricted in a coordinated blackout, as documented in the Reddit API controversy record. Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and other clients shut down on June 30, 2023.
The reason this history matters to you: the pricing was not designed for developers who want a few thousand posts. It was designed to bill AI labs. You are collateral, and you should price your project accordingly.
What does the Reddit API cost at real scale?
At real collection volume, $0.24 per 1,000 calls adds up fast because each call returns only a page of data. Reddit caps a listing call at about 100 items, so pulling 1,000,000 comments takes on the order of 10,000 calls, or about $2.40 in raw metering, before retries, pagination overhead, and the calls you spend just finding the content. The headline rate is cheap; the call count is what bites.
Here is the honest shape of it. The raw per-call rate is low. What makes real bills large is volume and inefficiency: rate-limit backoff, re-fetching, and the reality that Reddit meters calls, not useful records.
The first time you actually count the calls a real pull needs, the sticker rate stops looking cheap. That is the trap. People price the project on $0.24 and budget for the headline, not the call count.
And that is only the metered part. Commercial access sits behind an approval process, so the real cost includes the time to apply, get reviewed, and manage OAuth clients and rate limits in your own code. For many teams, that engineering overhead outweighs the per-call fee.
What are the alternatives to the Reddit API?
The realistic alternatives are Reddit’s own free tier for small projects, a managed data API for hands-off collection, and a self-hosted scraper for one-off pulls. Each trades cost against control and effort. Pushshift, the archive researchers relied on for years, is now restricted to approved moderators, so it is off the table for general use.
The options, ranked by how little work they leave you:
- Reddit’s free tier plus a wrapper (PRAW). Free and official for non-commercial work under 100 queries per minute. You manage OAuth, rate limits, and pagination yourself. Best for hobby projects and bots.
- A managed data API. You send a request and get clean Reddit data back, with the collection, rate limits, and approval headaches handled for you. Billed per item, not per call. Best when you want data, not infrastructure.
- A self-hosted local scraper. Free tools that parse Reddit’s public pages from your own machine. Best for a single throwaway pull, worst for anything you need to keep running.
- Data resellers and archives. Third-party datasets of Reddit content. Best for bulk historical analysis, worst for anything current.
There is no single right answer. A moderator’s bot and an analytics startup should pick different rows.
How do you get Reddit data through a data API instead?
You call one endpoint with a subreddit, a keyword, or a post URL, and get structured Reddit data back, no OAuth app or $0.24-per-1,000 meter involved. A managed API handles the rate limits and the approval step for you, and bills per item returned instead of per call. That removes the two things the official API makes you own: the throttling code and the metering math.
With ScraperSocial, the Reddit endpoints map to what people actually pull:
Credits are $0.005 each on the monthly plan and $0.0045 on annual, so a Reddit post is about two cents and comments or search results are about one cent each. You send a keyword to /v1/reddit/search, a post URL to /v1/reddit/post-comments, or a subreddit to /v1/reddit/subreddit, and the response is the same clean envelope on every call.
import requestsr = requests.get( "https://api.scrapersocial.com/v1/reddit/search", params={"query": "your brand", "limit": 50}, headers={"Authorization": "Bearer sk_live_..."},)print(r.json()["data"])The trade you are making is control for speed. You give up the ability to tune every call, and you get to skip OAuth, app review, and rate-limit engineering. The 100 free signup credits cover about 25 posts or 50 comments to test the shape first.
Is it legal to get Reddit data without the official API?
Reading Reddit’s public posts and comments is collecting public data, which US courts have generally allowed, though Reddit’s own terms are a separate question from the law. In hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed in April 2022 that scraping publicly available data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That covers the federal-law question, not a platform’s contract terms.
So treat it as a compliance decision, not a settled yes. Stick to public data, do not log in with a personal account to bypass limits, and cap how long you retain anything tied to a username.
None of this is legal advice. If your use is commercial or high-volume, run it past counsel before you build on it.
Price the project, then pick the tool
Do the call-count math before you commit to the official API. If your project fits inside 100 queries per minute and is non-commercial, Reddit’s free tier is the cheapest option that exists, and you should use it. If you are commercial, at scale, or just done maintaining OAuth and rate-limit code, a per-item data API is the faster path to the data. Start by counting the calls your job actually needs, then choose the row that costs you the least of what you value.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Reddit API free?
Yes, within limits. Reddit’s Data API has a free tier of 100 queries per minute per OAuth client (10 without OAuth), and it stays free for accessibility apps, moderation tools, and academic research. Commercial or high-volume use is billed at $0.24 per 1,000 API calls after an approval step, so “free” holds only until you scale or go commercial.
How much does the Reddit API cost?
Reddit charges $0.24 per 1,000 API calls for commercial access above the free tier, a rate that took effect on July 1, 2023. There is a free tier of 100 queries per minute with OAuth. Higher-volume commercial access is negotiated and gated behind approval, with reports of a roughly $12,000-per-year minimum.
Why did Reddit start charging for its API?
Reddit began charging in 2023 after its API had been free since 2008, with CEO Steve Huffman saying AI companies were training models on Reddit data for free. The move priced out third-party apps: Apollo’s developer was quoted about $20 million a year and shut the app down, triggering a blackout across 7,000-plus subreddits in June 2023.
What is the Reddit API rate limit?
Reddit’s free Data API tier allows 100 queries per minute per authenticated OAuth client, and 10 queries per minute for clients without OAuth. That works out to roughly 144,000 calls a day per client on the OAuth tier. Above that, or for commercial use, you move to paid access at $0.24 per 1,000 calls.
Can I still scrape Reddit without the API?
Yes. You can read Reddit’s public pages without the official API, and developers routinely do so with local scrapers or third-party data APIs. Courts have generally allowed scraping public data, though Reddit’s terms are a separate question. A managed data API handles the collection and rate limits for you without an OAuth app or the $0.24-per-1,000 metering.
What are the best Reddit API alternatives?
The main alternatives are Reddit’s own free tier with a wrapper like PRAW for small non-commercial projects, a managed third-party data API for hands-off collection across subreddits and comments, and a self-hosted local scraper for one-off pulls. Pushshift, the old research archive, is now restricted to approved moderators, so it is no longer a general option.