The Reddit API got expensive. Here is what to use instead.

The shift hit the developer community first, but the downstream effect is more interesting: the simple pattern of “write a Python script over a long weekend to pull comments from a subreddit you care about” is no longer free. The cost per thread is small, but the friction is real, and for one-off use cases it stopped making sense.

What actually changed in 2023

Reddit announced API pricing in April 2023 and enforced it in June. The pricing through 2026 (before the March 2027 closure):

• Free tier: ~100 queries per minute per OAuth client, capped at small daily volumes.
• Paid tier: ~$0.24 per 1,000 API calls, billed monthly, after the free quota.
• OAuth still required for anything beyond trivial unauthenticated reads.
• Bulk historical access (the “Pushshift” pattern) is largely gone unless you’re an approved researcher.

For a single thread of 2,000 comments, you’re looking at maybe a few cents — but you’re also looking at registering an OAuth app, generating credentials, dealing with rate limits, and maintaining the auth dance. For people who pull threads occasionally, that math is bad.

The honest options today

Option A — Browser extension (no API)

A Chrome extension running on the Reddit page you already have open doesn’t hit the API at all in a meaningful sense — it reads the JSON response your browser is loading anyway. No auth, no rate limit math, no per-call pricing. Just the comments, structured, in CSV or JSON.

This is what we built. It’s free for the first 100 comments of any thread (Plus removes the cap), and it works on any thread you can open in a browser. The only thing it can’t do is run unattended on a server — for that you still want PRAW or the official API. The full overview lives on the Reddit thread exporter and comment scraper page.

Add to Chrome — Free

Option B — PRAW with the new pricing

If you’re already a Python developer and need automation, PRAW still works. You pay the per-call cost, you handle the auth, and you write the recursion to expand MoreComments placeholders. It’s the right answer for a real pipeline; it’s the wrong answer for a Tuesday-night research question.

# Works until Reddit closes the public API in March 2027.
import praw
reddit = praw.Reddit(client_id=..., client_secret=..., user_agent=...)
submission = reddit.submission(url="https://reddit.com/r/...")
submission.comments.replace_more(limit=None)
for c in submission.comments.list(): ...

Option B½ — Our hosted API

If you want a programmatic interface but don’t want to deal with Reddit’s OAuth flow, the per-call billing, or writing the recursion to expand “more replies,” we now offer a small Reddit comments API. One HTTP call returns the full thread as a clean JSON tree — hierarchy preserved, "more replies" already expanded. Pro plans include 100 thread exports per month. Same backend the Chrome extension uses, just exposed as an endpoint with code samples in cURL, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Go, and Java.

Option C — Pushshift (mostly gone)

Pushshift was the historical-archive API researchers used to use. After the 2023 changes it became gated to verified moderators and approved academic researchers. If you have access, it’s still useful for time-series subreddit analysis. For most people, treat it as unavailable.

Option D — “Scraping” services

Several third-party services scrape Reddit on your behalf and resell the data. They are often expensive, frequently break when Reddit changes its frontend, and create a redistribution legal question you don’t want. Avoid unless you have a specific compliance reason to outsource.

A cost comparison for one thread, 2,000 comments

Approach	Setup time	Cost per thread	Hierarchy preserved?
Chrome extension	~30 seconds	$0	Yes
PRAW + paid API	30–60 minutes (first time)	~$0.05	If you write the recursion
Reseller service	Account setup	$0.20 — $2.00	Varies
Copy-paste	0	$0	No

When to pick what

Pick the extension when: you’re a marketer, researcher, journalist, founder, or analyst; you read threads and want them in a spreadsheet; you don’t want to write code; you want it to be free. The dedicated Reddit research tool guide covers the citation-friendly workflow; the Reddit marketing hooks guide covers the ad-angle workflow.

Pick PRAW when: you’re building automation; you need to monitor a subreddit on a schedule; you’re inside a backend pipeline.

Pick our API when: you want a programmatic interface but don’t want to manage Reddit OAuth, per-call billing, or "more replies" recursion. Predictable monthly quota, one HTTP call per thread, ready-made code samples in six languages.

Pick a reseller when: your compliance team requires a vendor with a contract and an SLA, and the per-call cost doesn’t matter.

The deeper issue: pricing changed who Reddit is for

The 2023 change wasn’t about money — Reddit doesn’t make meaningful revenue from API fees. It was about controlling who can train language models on Reddit conversations. The downstream effect is that casual readers, researchers, and small builders now navigate a friction layer designed to repel large-scale extraction.

The browser-based pattern sidesteps that entirely because it isn’t extraction at scale — it’s one human reading one thread, with structured output. That’s a fundamentally different category, and it’s the category that wasn’t being served well.

Add to Chrome — Free Read the CSV guide