Hi There,

For some reason, I find reddit's api docs quite confusing, I want to fetch posts from a particular subreddit using python.

I know that I can use praw, reddit API used to be free till last year, but now how does it work?

Did they also go Twitter way to completely remove the read access from free api?

Where can I find pricing and other relevant details?

Thanks

I know nothing about API pricing, so I'm hoping the community can help me understand the problem here. Reddit is charging $0.24 per 1,000 API calls. How does that compare to API pricing from other services? What should Reddit be charging?

Hello All,

I imagine this has been asked multiple times but can't seem to find a post after googling it. Could you please let me know the pricing for the API?

I would like to build something that tracks subreddit metrics, users, posts, comments, over time and store in a database. That may mean multiple calls, depending on how many subbreddits I choose to track.

Any info will be most appreciated!

Dear redditors,

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Steve aka u/spez. I am one of the founders of Reddit, and I’ve been CEO since 2015. On Wednesday, I celebrated my 18th cake-day, which is about 17 years and 9 months longer than I thought this project would last. To be with you here today on Reddit—even in a heated moment like this—is an honor.

I want to talk with you today about what’s happening within the community and frustration stemming from changes we are making to access our API. I spoke to a number of moderators on Wednesday and yesterday afternoon and our product and community teams have had further conversations with mods as well.

First, let me share the background on this topic as well as some clarifying details. On 4/18, we shared that we would update access to the API, including premium access for third parties who require additional capabilities and higher usage limits. Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.

There’s been a lot of confusion over what these changes mean, and I want to highlight what these changes mean for moderators and developers.

• Terms of Service

  • Effective June 19, 2023, our updated Data API Terms, together with our Developer Terms, replaced the existing Data API terms.

• Free Data API

  • Effective July 1, 2023, the rate limits to use the Data API free of charge are:

    • 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication and 10 queries per minute if you are not using OAuth authentication.

    • Today, over 90% of apps fall into this category and can continue to access the Data API for free.

• Premium Enterprise API / Third-party apps

  • Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app).

  • Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect.

  • For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.

• Mod Tools

  • We know many communities rely on tools like RES, ContextMod, Toolbox, etc., and these tools will continue to have free access to the Data API.

  • We’re working together with Pushshift to restore access for verified moderators.

• Mod Bots

  • If you’re creating free bots that help moderators and users (e.g. haikubot, setlistbot, etc), please continue to do so. You can contact us here if you have a bot that requires access to the Data API above the free limits.

  • Developer Platform is a new platform designed to let users and developers expand the Reddit experience by providing powerful features for building moderation tools, creative tools, games, and more. We are currently in a closed beta with hundreds of developers (sign up here). For those of you who have been around a while, it is the spiritual successor to both the API and Custom CSS.

• Explicit Content

  • Effective July 5, 2023, we will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed.

  • This change will not impact any moderator bots or extensions. In our conversations with moderators and developers, we heard two areas of feedback we plan to address.

• Accessibility - We want everyone to be able to use Reddit. As a result, non-commercial, accessibility-focused apps and tools will continue to have free access. We’re working with apps like RedReader and Dystopia and a few others to ensure they can continue to access the Data API.

• Better mobile moderation - We need more efficient moderation tools, especially on mobile. They are coming. We’ve launched improvements to some tools recently and will continue to do so. About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.

Mods, I appreciate all the time you’ve spent with us this week, and all the time prior as well. Your feedback is invaluable. We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private. We are all responsible for ensuring Reddit provides an open accessible place for people to find community and belonging.

I will be sticking around to answer questions along with other admins. We know answers are tough to find, so we're switching the default sort to Q&A mode. You can view responses from the following admins here:

• u/spez

• u/KeyserSosa

• u/Go_JasonWaterfalls

• u/FlyingLaserTurtle

- Steve

P.S. old.reddit.com isn’t going anywhere, and explicit content is still allowed on Reddit as long as it abides by our content policy.

edit: formatting

I want to make a small reddit based saas. I'm willing to pay the .24 for API access but after looking through posts it seems that reddit just ignores most commercial application requests if they are not big enough?

Otherwise I'm happy to use the free tier as that is really all I need wrt rate limits, but I am not allowed to paywall that? Now this makes me unsure what to do.

How are people building small reddit based applications?

Hey all,

I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.

Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I'd be in the red every month.

I'm deeply disappointed in this price. Reddit iterated that the price would be A) reasonable and based in reality, and B) they would not operate like Twitter. Twitter's pricing was publicly ridiculed for its obscene price of $42,000 for 50 million tweets. Reddit's is still $12,000. For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.

As for the pricing, despite claims that it would be based in reality, it seems anything but. Less than 2 years ago they said they crossed $100M in quarterly revenue for the first time ever, if we assume despite the economic downturn that they've managed to do that every single quarter now, and for your best quarter, you've doubled it to $200M. Let's also be generous and go far, far above industry estimates and say you made another $50M in Reddit Premium subscriptions. That's $550M in revenue per year, let's say an even $600M. In 2019, they said they hit 430 million monthly active users, and to also be generous, let's say they haven't added a single active user since then (if we do revenue-per-user calculations, the more users, the less revenue each user would contribute). So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well.

For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly. With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue. The average subscription user currently uses 473 requests, which would cost $3.51, or 29x higher.

While Reddit has been communicative and civil throughout this process with half a dozen phone calls back and forth that I thought went really well, I don't see how this pricing is anything based in reality or remotely reasonable. I hope it goes without saying that I don't have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card.

This is going to require some thinking. I asked Reddit if they were flexible on this pricing or not, and they stated that it's their understanding that no, this will be the pricing, and I'm free to post the details of the call if I wish.

- Christian

(For the uninitiated wondering "what the heck is an API anyway and why is this so important?" it's just a fancy term for a way to access a site's information ("Application Programming Interface"). As an analogy, think of Reddit having a bouncer, and since day one that bouncer has been friendly, where if you ask "Hey, can you list out the comments for me for post X?" the bouncer would happily respond with what you requested, provided you didn't ask so often that it was silly. That's the Reddit API: I ask Reddit/the bouncer for some data, and it provides it so I can display it in my app for users. The proposed changes mean the bouncer will still exist, but now ask an exorbitant amount per question.)

tl;dr - As of July 1, we will start enforcing rate limits for a free access tier, available to our current API users. If you are already in contact with our team about commercial compliance with our Data API Terms, look for an email about enterprise pricing this week.

We recently shared updates on our Data API Terms and Developer Terms. These updates help clarify how developers can safely and securely use Reddit’s tools and services, including our APIs and our new-and-improved Developer Platform.

After sharing these terms, we identified several parties in violation, and contacted them so they could make the required changes to become compliant. This includes developers of large-scale applications who have excessive usage, are violating our users’ privacy and content rights, or are using the data for ad-supported or commercial purposes.

For context on excessive usage, here is a chart showing the average monthly overage, compared to the longstanding rate limit in our developer documentation of 60 queries per minute (86,400 per day):

We reached out to the most impactful large scale applications in order to work out terms for access above our default rate limits via an enterprise tier. This week, we are sharing an enterprise-level access tier for large scale applications with the developers we’re already in contact with. The enterprise tier is a privilege that we will extend to select partners based on a number of factors, including value added to redditors and communities, and it will go into effect on July 1.

Rate limits for the free tier

All others will continue to access the Reddit Data API without cost, in accordance with our Developer Terms, at this time. Many of you already know that our stated rate limit, per this documentation, was 60 queries per minute. As of July 1, 2023, we will enforce two different rate limits for the free access tier:

• If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id

• If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute

Important note: currently, our rate limit response headers indicate counts by client id/user id combination. These headers will update to reflect this new policy based on client id only on July 1.

To avoid any issues with the operation of mod bots or extensions, it’s important for developers to add Oauth to their bots. If you believe your mod bot needs to exceed these updated rate limits, or will be unable to operate, please reach out here.

If you haven't heard from us, assume that your app will be rate-limited, starting on July 1. If your app requires enterprise access, please contact us here, so that we can better understand your needs and discuss a path forward.

Additional changes

Finally, to ensure that all regulatory requirements are met in the handling of mature content, we will be limiting access to sexually explicit content for third-party apps starting on July 5, 2023, except for moderation needs.

If you are curious about academic or research-focused access to the Data API, we’ve shared more details here.

I might have no choice but to pay for the Reddit API for the business I run. I have however struggled to find where to pay/sign up for the new Reddit API tiers, does anyone know how to do this?

What am I missing here? What would prevent an app from calling the API directly with the user's OAuth tokens?

In looking at the newly imposed API limits, the free-tier still allows up to 100 API calls/min, which seems it would equate to far more than the average 345 calls/day than are currently being used. This seems like an blatantly obvious solution that none of the app devs have pursued for some reason.

Rate limits for the free tier All others will continue to access the Reddit Data API without cost, in accordance with our Developer Terms, at this time. Many of you already know that our stated rate limit, per this documentation, was 60 queries per minute. As of July 1, 2023, we will enforce two different rate limits for the free access tier:

• If you are using OAuth for authentication: 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id

• If you are not using OAuth for authentication: 10 queries per minute

_

Claims that Apollo is "inefficient" Another common claim by Reddit is that Apollo is inherently inefficient, using on average 345 requests per day per user, while some other apps use 100. I'd like to use some numbers to illustrate why I think this is very unfairly framing it. Up until a week ago, the stated Reddit API rate limits that apps were asked to operate within was 60 requests per minute per user. That works out to a total of 86,400 per day. Reddit stated that Apollo uses 345 requests per user per day on average, which is also in line with my findings. Thats 0.4% of the limit Reddit was previously imposing, which I would say is quite efficient.