The Problem
I was spending way too much time on Reddit marketing.
Not the spammy kind - organic comment marketing. Finding relevant threads, leaving helpful replies, letting people discover my project through my profile.
The strategy works. But manually scrolling through subreddits for 2-3 hours a day? Not sustainable.
Most marketing tools are built for Twitter or SEO. Reddit is still this weird afterthought.
What I Built
A desktop scraper that runs locally on your machine.
Core features:
- Scrapes subreddits by keyword
- Filters threads by comment count (the key insight: threads with <5 comments = nobody's answered yet = your reply gets visibility)
- Exports to CSV for further analysis
- Uses your own IP, not cloud proxies (Reddit flags those instantly)
Tech stack: Python + PyQt for the desktop UI. Nothing fancy.
Why Local Instead of SaaS?
- No subscription fees - I was paying $49/month for tools that half-worked
- Privacy - Your scraping activity stays on your machine
- No rate limits - SaaS tools share API limits across users
- Reddit-friendly - Residential IP means Reddit treats you like a normal user
The Results
- 3 hours of manual scrolling → 20 minutes
- Finding 50+ relevant threads per week instead of 10
- 200+ users from organic Reddit comments alone
Try It
Dropped the tool at wappkit.com/download - it's free.
Built this for myself but figured other devs doing side project marketing might find it useful.
Anyone else building local tools instead of paying for SaaS? Would love to hear what you've built.
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