Getting structured data out of Reddit keeps getting harder: the public .json endpoints were shut down in May 2026, Wayback snapshots stopped in 2025, and official API access now sits behind pre-approval. If you just need a few thousand posts or comments as clean JSON — for market research, social listening, or an AI dataset — the remaining options are mostly heavyweight browser scrapers.
I maintain Reddit Data Scraper, an Apify Actor that takes a different route: plain HTTP requests against Reddit's HTML, no headless browser, no login, no API key. That keeps runs fast and cheap, with a couple of honest trade-offs I'll list at the end.
Below are the four jobs people actually use it for. Each link opens a pre-configured example you can run as-is or tweak.
1. Track every mention of a keyword
Reddit keyword monitoring — search all of Reddit for a phrase (a brand, a competitor, a technology) and export the matching posts: title, subreddit, author, score, comment count, permalink, UTC timestamp. The time filter is relative (week, month), so a scheduled run always returns the fresh slice.
2. Export a full comment thread
Reddit comment thread export — feed it one post URL and get every comment with nesting depth and parent id, enough to rebuild the tree offline or run sentiment analysis on the whole discussion.
3. Top posts of a subreddit
Subreddit top posts — the classic market-research pull: top posts of any subreddit for the past week, with scores, flairs, comment counts and links.
4. A user's public history
Reddit user history — one account's public posts and comments in a single run, NSFW filtered out by default.
The honest trade-offs
- Public data only. No logins, no private or quarantined communities.
- No CAPTCHA or JS-challenge solving — by design. If Reddit blocks a request, the Actor retries within documented rate limits and then fails loudly instead of pretending the page was empty. You get an error, not silently missing rows.
- Documented rate-limit etiquette. The request pacing is in the README, not hidden.
Pricing is pay-per-result ($1.90 per 1,000 posts, $0.75 per 1,000 comments), so an empty or failed run costs nothing.
If one of the recipes almost fits but not quite, open an issue on the Actor page — input schema changes are cheap.
— Oleg Naryzhnykh
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