Apify Reddit Scraper Deprecated: Why Actors Broke in 2026 and How to Migrate

The most used Apify Reddit actor, trudax/reddit-scraper, now carries a Deprecated label on its Apify Store page. If a scheduled Reddit run of yours started returning errors, fewer items or nothing at all this year, the cause is on Reddit's side, and one more change lands on November 13, 2026.

TL;DR: The trudax/reddit-scraper Store page showed a Deprecated label, 15K total users and 483 monthly active users when we read it on 7 November 2026. Logged-out Reddit reads began returning 403 in late May 2026, and Reddit stops supporting RSS on November 13. Check every run for silent empty results, then pick a route.

This is an independent guide from redditapis.com, a third-party API that is not affiliated with Reddit, Inc. or with Apify. We sell a Reddit data API, so we have a stake in where you land; the Apify facts below link to the actor pages and changelogs they come from, and the cost comparison is in our separate Reddit API pricing vs Apify post. What redditapis.com reads and which calls it bills is on our data access page.

Is the Apify Reddit Scraper deprecated?

Yes. The trudax/reddit-scraper actor shows a Deprecated label on its Apify Store page, read on 7 November 2026, along with a link to alternative actors. It is maintained by the community, not by Apify, and it was still the actor ranking first on Google for "apify reddit scraper" that day.

What the Store page showed when we read it:

• Status: Deprecated, with a "See alternative Actors" link.
• Usage: 15K total users, 483 monthly active users and 252 bookmarks.
• Rating: 2.6 out of 5 from 30 reviews.
• Price line: from $0.10 per 1,000 results, plus Apify platform usage; the README says 1,000 results cost "less than $4 in platform usage credits".
• Last modified: "a day ago" on the page; the newest changelog entry is 5.9.0 of 5 November 2026.

The sibling Reddit Scraper Lite by the same developer was not marked deprecated on the same day. It is the bigger of the two by far, with 52,365 total users and 8,622 monthly active users, and it shares the same RSS default described below.

Why did Apify Reddit actors stop working in 2026?

Because Reddit stopped serving logged-out reads. The first public reports we found are dated 29 and 30 May 2026, when developers saw .json requests return 403. The trudax actor shipped 4.22.2 on 30 May and a breaking 5.0.0 on 31 May, both about 403 errors, and the blocks never fully went away.

The r/apify thread that opened the wave is short and blunt:

What the replies in that thread established, in order:

• 1 June 2026: "You can no longer access the 'subreddit url + .json' API without valid session cookies."
• 19 August 2026: a developer who had pulled about 6.5k posts found that logged-out requests to any .json endpoint "returned 403 100% of the time", from a residential IP, at any volume.
• Same reply: "Pacing doesn't buy you anything without" a logged-in session, so slowing a logged-out run down does not bring it back.

The same break shows up outside Apify. One builder wrote in September that it was "json endpoints 403 everywhere, 1 feed per minute per ip":

Ben 🏛️

@Ben100__

for my reddit tool i spent the whole summer working around a closed api json endpoints 403 everywhere, 1 feed per minute per ip, official access at 12k$ a month for a saas ended up with a cloudflare relay and rss feeds read by an agent, it runs but it's duct tape now

Our .json endpoint explainer covers the technical side of the change in more depth.

What did the deprecated actor's changelog say?

It reads like a running log of the lockdown. Between 30 May and 5 November 2026 the trudax actor shipped fixes for 403 errors, anti-block logic, 429 errors and session rotation, and the 5.0.0 release warned that responses "could be missing some of the previous fields".

The releases that matter, from the actor changelog:

Two things follow for anyone still running it:

• Fields can be missing without an error. The 5.0.0 note is the only warning you get that a column your report depends on may now be empty.
• Each fix is a race. Five block-related releases between May and November is the pattern of a source that keeps moving.

Why does a broken run look like a clean run with no results?

Because a Reddit block page is HTML, not JSON. A run that parses JSON inside a try block and returns an empty list on failure turns a total block into "0 items found", which looks exactly like a quiet subreddit. Check status codes before you trust any zero.

The three failure shapes we see described most often:

• A 403 that reads as zero results. The run succeeds, the dataset is empty, nobody gets paged.
• Fields that disappear. Scores or comment counts arrive blank after a breaking release.
• A thinner default mode. RSS-based runs return titles and links but no votes or comment counts.

A quick way to check your own history, if your runs write to a table:

-- days where a scheduled Reddit run returned nothing
SELECT run_date, COUNT(*) AS items
FROM reddit_items
GROUP BY run_date
HAVING COUNT(*) = 0
ORDER BY run_date DESC;

What happens to Apify Reddit actors on November 13, 2026?

Reddit stops supporting RSS feeds that day, per its 30 September 2026 admin post on r/modnews. Any actor run that reads Reddit through RSS loses its source. Both trudax actors use RSS by default, so default runs are the most exposed, whatever their price.

The r/modnews post cites large-scale scraping and automated abuse as the reason, and points moderators to Devvit apps. TechCrunch reported the change the same day, alongside the end of public API access by March 2027. The trudax README says that with includeMediaLinks off, the default, "the scraper uses fast RSS feeds", which omit or limit these fields:

• upVotes and upVoteRatio
• numberOfComments
• imageUrls and videoUrls
• authorFlair, flair and userId
• isVideo, isAd and over18

Developers in the r/scrapingtheweb thread are already passing this around. When one commenter suggested on 29 October that "polling the native RSS feeds with a basic script is basically free", the reply on 3 November was: "it's being phased out of support november 13 2026." Our RSS shutdown explainer lists what else breaks that day.

Which Apify Reddit actors are still listed, and what do they cost?

Several. On 7 November 2026 the Apify Store listed active Reddit actors from Apify itself, from trudax (Lite), and from independent developers such as harshmaur and automation-lab, with "from" prices between $1.15 and $3.40 per 1,000 items. Each one has its own method, fields and maintenance record.

Notes from each page, read the same day:

• apify/reddit-scraper is maintained by Apify, needs no Reddit login or API key, and says "Only public content is read". It is pay per event, from $2.50 per 1,000 posts, with 336 monthly users.
• harshmaur/reddit-scraper lists a starting price of $2 for every 1,000 results and 4.7 from 43 reviews.
• automation-lab/reddit-scraper lists from $1.15 per 1,000 posts and $0.58 per 1,000 comments, with empty runs free.
• trudax/reddit-scraper-lite lists from $3.40 per 1,000 results and shares the RSS default.

Apify's own tutorial for the deprecated actor still ranks on the first page for this search, and it is a clear picture of how the input form works if you are mapping an old job:

How to extract data from Reddit with Reddit Scraper

Apify

For cost per workload rather than per listing, see Reddit API pricing vs Apify.

How many people are looking for a way out?

A steady share. We searched Reddit for "apify reddit" over the past year through our own API and checked how many post titles asked for an alternative or reported a block, a failure or rising cost. One in five did, and the r/apify community carries a regular stream of Reddit questions.

We measured it through our own API:

Of the 35 Reddit posts from the past year that our search returned for apify reddit, 20% asked for an alternative or reported a block, a failure or rising cost in the title.

Our data · Dataset: apify-reddit-posts-past-year · Source: public Reddit posts, pulled through our API · Query: GET /search?q=apify+reddit&sort=relevance&t=year&limit=100 · Pulled: 2026-11-07 · n = 35 · Method: share of items whose title matches /(block|alternative|expensive|not work|broken|deprecat|stopp|fail|instead)/i; frame: 35 unique items from 1 page(s), duplicates removed

In the past year, 29 posts in r/apify matched a search for reddit.

Our data · Dataset: r-apify-reddit-posts-past-year · Source: public Reddit posts, pulled through our API · Query: GET /search?q=reddit&subreddit=apify&sort=new&t=year&limit=100 · Pulled: 2026-11-07 · n = 29 · Method: count of items; filtered to subreddit matching /^apify$/i; frame: 29 unique items from 1 page(s), duplicates removed

The titles say it plainly: "Is there any alternative to apify for Reddit?" in r/n8n in July, and "What are you guys using to scrape Reddit at scale? Apify is getting expensive" in r/scrapingtheweb in September. The n8n poster wrote that "Apify's free plan consumes 5$ very quickly":

Should you switch to another Apify actor or leave the actor model?

Switch actors if you run a few jobs a month and only need titles and links. Leave the actor model if your job runs daily or hourly, needs scores and full comment trees, or feeds a product that cannot go quiet for a week while a fix ships. The choice is per job, not per company.

The questions that decide it:

• How often does it run? A monthly research pull tolerates a broken week; a brand alert does not.
• Which fields do you read? If your report sorts by score or comment count, RSS mode is not enough.
• Who notices a zero? If nobody checks, pick the route with the fewest moving parts.
• Who maintains the reader? An actor is one developer's release cycle; an API is a versioned contract.

What are the routes for reading Reddit after November 13?

Four practical ones: another maintained actor, your own logged-in session, a Devvit app that runs inside Reddit, or a keyed data API that returns JSON. Each moves the maintenance burden to a different place, and only one of them puts your own Reddit account on the line.

How each one plays out:

• Another actor. Same platform, same dataset format, new developer to trust. Check its README for an RSS default and its changelog for recent block fixes.
• A logged-in session. Developers report that session cookies still work, but the requests then run as your account, which is the account Reddit can limit.
• A Devvit app. Reddit's own route since its 30 September 2026 timeline; right for moderation tools, wrong for an external dashboard. Reddit's own Data API to Devvit migration guide is the starting point, and our Developer Platform migration guide covers which jobs port cleanly.
• A keyed data API. A provider such as redditapis.com returns public posts, comments and search over REST with an API key. Compare providers on our alternatives page.

Historical backfills are a separate question; the Pushshift alternatives guide covers archives.

How do you map Apify actor inputs to a REST API?

One input at a time. A search term becomes a search call, a subreddit start URL becomes a subreddit listing, a post URL becomes a comment-tree call, and a date limit becomes "sort by new and stop at the last id you stored". The mapping is mechanical once you list your inputs.

How deep a listing reaches, and why Reddit lists stop near 1,000 items on every route, is measured in our limitations guide and the pagination guide. The trudax README says the same thing about its own runs: the 1,000 item ceiling "is not a limitation of the scraper".

What does the first API call look like?

A single HTTPS request with an API key. The call below replaces a keyword search run: it returns up to 100 posts as JSON with title, author, score, comment count, permalink and an after cursor for the next page, with no actor run, no dataset and no RSS dependency.

curl -sS "https://api.redditapis.com/api/reddit/search?q=your%20brand&sort=new&t=week&limit=100" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $REDDITAPIS_KEY"

What changes compared with an actor run:

• No run to wait for. The response is the data; there is no dataset to fetch afterwards.
• Paging is explicit. Pass the after value back to get the next page.
• Failures are loud. A bad key or a limit returns an HTTP error, not an empty list.

And the subreddit listing that replaces a start URL:

curl -sS "https://api.redditapis.com/api/reddit/posts?subreddit=redditdev&limit=5&sort=new" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $REDDITAPIS_KEY"

If the job is "tell me when a keyword appears", a monitor that pushes matches to a webhook, Slack or Discord replaces the schedule entirely; see the monitoring API page. Python users coming from PRAW can map calls with the PRAW vs REST comparison, and the quickstart gets the first call running.

How do you migrate an n8n, Make or Zapier flow off the actor?

Keep the trigger and the destination, and swap only the middle. Replace the Apify node with an HTTP Request node that calls the API with your key in a header, map the same fields into the same columns, and store the last seen post id so each run handles only new posts.

The step list:

1. Replace the Apify node with an HTTP Request node and set the Authorization header from a stored credential.
2. Keep the existing trigger and cadence.
3. Store the last seen post id in a sheet, a table or the n8n data store.
4. Map title, author, score, num_comments and permalink into the old columns.
5. Add a branch that alerts when a run returns zero items.

The top answer in the r/n8n thread gave the same advice: "dedupe by post/comment ID" and "keep a review queue instead of auto-acting on every hit". Our n8n guide has the full workflow, and the no-code tools comparison covers Make and Zapier.

Is reading Reddit through a third-party API allowed?

It depends on your use and the provider's terms, so read both. redditapis.com is an independent third-party API, not affiliated with Reddit, Inc., and it does not claim Reddit's approval. Moving off an actor changes who maintains the reader; it does not change your obligations for how you store and use Reddit content.

What to check before you migrate:

• The provider's terms and what it says about how it reads Reddit; ours is on the data access page.
• Reddit's policies for your use, including the Responsible Builder Policy explainer.
• Your retention. Store ids so you can re-fetch and honour deletions.
• Commercial or training use. Answering a question with a live search and training a model are different uses.

Our legal explainer covers the open questions, and the October 31 cutoff guide explains why a new Reddit Data API key is no longer an option for a new project.

Apify actor vs Reddit Data API vs a third-party data API

They answer different questions. An Apify actor is a hosted reader maintained by its developer. The Reddit Data API is Reddit's keyed route, closed to new requests since October 31, 2026. A third-party data API is a keyed REST service that returns Reddit data as JSON.

• Apify actor: dataset output, priced per result or per event, maintained per actor; check for an RSS default.
• Reddit Data API: OAuth, PRAW-compatible, no new requests after October 31, 2026, public access closing in March 2027.
• Third-party data API: REST and JSON, an API key at signup, one versioned contract.

On X, one builder summed up the year as "logged-out .json endpoints went dark in late may":

Om Patel

@om_patel5

reddit shut off logged-out access to its data, and it took out half my product overnight over half of all calls to my mcp server were reddit tools. every one of them started returning 403 so i rebuilt it in a day, and now it works better than before heres what happened and how… Show more

Our comparison with the official API goes field by field, and the scraping hub covers every method in one place.

Migration checklist

Do this before November 13, 2026. List every Reddit run you own, find the ones that use RSS or logged-out reads, decide per job whether to switch actors or move to an API, run the new route beside the old one for a week, then retire the schedule.

The checklist:

• Inventory: every scheduled actor run, its inputs, its destination and who reads it.
• Flag RSS runs: any run with includeMediaLinks off on a trudax actor.
• Flag silent zeros: any day in the last six months with zero items.
• Decide per job: another actor for light, occasional pulls; an API for daily, field-heavy or customer-facing jobs.
• Run side by side: one week, compare item counts per day.
• Retire: stop the old schedule and remove stored Reddit cookies or tokens.

When you are ready to test the API route, signup issues a key, the pricing page shows the cost per call, and the API documentation lists every endpoint.