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Reddit Scraper — Pay Per Result, Deep History, Full Comment Trees

Scrape Reddit posts, comments, subreddits, search results, and user histories — without a monthly rental fee. This actor charges only for posts actually scraped, handles deep historical backfill through Reddit's full pagination API, and delivers nested comment trees that most alternatives silently truncate.

Keywords: reddit scraper, reddit api, scrape reddit posts, reddit comments scraper, subreddit scraper, reddit data, reddit post scraper

Why This Beats the Alternatives

The most-used Reddit scrapers on the Apify Store have a consistent set of problems:

The two-year track record of 2.7-star reviews on competing actors comes down to these four issues. This actor was built specifically to fix all of them.

Features

• 4 scraping modes: subreddit listings, Reddit-wide search, user post history, and specific post URLs
• Deep historical backfill: paginate through Reddit's full history using the after cursor — not capped at 100 or 1,000 posts
• Cursor resume: the summary item always contains last_after_cursor so you can continue a run exactly where it left off by passing it as input
• Full nested comment trees: recursive extraction up to configurable depth (default 3), with more stubs preserved so you know where truncation occurred
• Honest billing: PPE (pay-per-event) — charged exactly once per successfully scraped post, never on fetch errors or empty runs
• Zero charge on empty runs: if no posts are scraped the actor calls Actor.fail() with a plain-English reason — your balance is untouched
• Graceful error handling: HTTP 429 with exponential backoff (5s / 10s / 20s), 404 and 403 handled per-resource, never crashes the whole run on a single bad post
• Responsible rate limiting: 1-second delay between page requests, proper User-Agent header on every request per Reddit's API requirements

Output Schema

Each post is one dataset item:

{
"id":"abc123",
"name":"t3_abc123",
"subreddit":"MachineLearning",
"subreddit_id":"t5_2fwo",
"title":"GPT-4 vs Claude 3 — which wins on reasoning?",
"author":"username123",
"score":1842,
"upvote_ratio":0.97,
"url":"https://i.imgur.com/example.jpg",
"permalink":"https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/abc123/...",
"selftext":"I ran 200 reasoning tasks on both...",
"is_self":true,
"domain":"self.MachineLearning",
"flair":"Discussion",
"num_comments":247,
"created_utc":1717200000,
"is_pinned":false,
"is_locked":false,
"awards_count":5,
"scraped_at":"2026-06-05T10:00:00.000Z",
"comments":[
{
"id":"xyz789",
"author":"commenter_a",
"body":"Claude wins on multi-step reasoning, GPT-4 on coding.",
"score":312,
"created_utc":1717201000,
"is_submitter":false,
"depth":0,
"replies":[
{
"id":"pqr456",
"author":"commenter_b",
"body":"Agree, tested this last week.",
"score":88,
"created_utc":1717201500,
"is_submitter":false,
"depth":1,
"replies":[]
}
]
}
]
}

comments is only present when includeComments=true. Deleted posts have author: "[deleted]" and selftext: "[removed]" — exactly as Reddit returns them.

At the end of every run, a summary item is pushed:

{
"_type":"summary",
"posts_requested":200,
"posts_scraped":197,
"posts_failed":3,
"subreddits_processed":2,
"charged_for":197,
"last_after_cursor":"t3_xyz999",
"scraped_at":"2026-06-05T10:04:22.000Z"
}

Pass last_after_cursor back in as the after input field on your next run to continue from exactly that point — this is the deep historical backfill feature.

Pricing

$2.50 per 1,000 posts scraped.

• No monthly fee, no minimum, no rental
• Charged per-event (PPE) — only on successful scrapes
• Zero charge if the run returns no results
• A run scraping 250 posts costs $0.625

This is the standard Apify pay-per-result model. You pay for outcomes, not for time on the platform.

Use Cases

• Market research — scrape subreddit discussions to understand what customers say about your product or competitors, unsolicited and unfiltered
• Sentiment analysis — collect scored posts and comments to build training datasets or feed NLP pipelines
• AI training data — gather large volumes of human-written text across diverse topics for fine-tuning or RLHF
• Brand monitoring — track mentions of your brand or keywords across all of Reddit with scheduled runs
• Academic research — download historical threads with full comment trees for discourse analysis, misinformation studies, community dynamics
• Competitive intelligence — monitor competitor subreddits, feature request threads, and complaint patterns

Rate Limits & Responsible Use

Reddit's public JSON API does not require OAuth for read-only access but does require:

1. A descriptive User-Agent header (included in every request)
2. No more than ~1 request per second (enforced by the 1s inter-page delay)

This actor targets Reddit's public JSON endpoints (*.reddit.com/*.json) rather than scraping rendered HTML. This is the same approach used by countless Reddit apps and is stable. If Reddit returns HTTP 429, the actor backs off automatically (5s → 10s → 20s) before retrying.

Do not use this actor to:

• Harvest personal data for advertising or resale
• Bypass Reddit's rate limits by running many parallel actors simultaneously
• Violate Reddit's User Agreement or Privacy Policy

Private subreddits, banned subreddits, and suspended users will return 403/404 — those runs still push error items explaining why, and you are not charged for them.

Input Reference