Reddit API documentation: the complete 2026 guide

Last updated August 2026 Our platform serves 59 REST endpoints, per our published API reference, and this guide walks all of them.

Every way to access the Reddit API

There is no single Reddit API. There are five practical routes to Reddit data, and they differ on authentication, rate limits, price, and whether they allow writes. The table lays them side by side so you can pick the one that fits your project before you write a line of code.

PRAW, the .json endpoints, and third-party scrapers all inherit Reddit's OAuth limits or its terms of service, and Pushshift, the historical archive many teams relied on, is now restricted to Reddit moderators. If you need a drop-in that skips the OAuth handshake, the app-review queue, and the per-minute cap, a hosted per-call API is the shortest path. For a deeper look at each route, see the PRAW alternative, the Pushshift alternative, the Reddit scraper API, and the cheapest Reddit API breakdowns. Curious what teams build once they have access? The use-cases page walks through trend spotting, brand monitoring, and product research.

Choosing between those five routes is easier with the numbers side by side. There is a latency, uptime and cost benchmark across providers, a head-to-head with Scrapingdog, a look at where no-code automation tools stop being enough, and a walkthrough of Arctic Shift as an archive source for AI agents. Before any of them goes into production, the commercial-use and licensing rules decide what you are allowed to do with the data at all, which is the question that most often gets asked last and should be asked first.

Quick reference

Authentication

Every request carries your key in one header. There is no OAuth token exchange, no refresh cycle, and no app-review step. Generate a key on the Reddit API key page, then send it as a bearer token:

Authorization: Bearer YOUR_REDDITAPIS_KEY

The same token works for reads, votes, writes, and direct messages, so there is a single credential to manage. For the exact header and a working request, see how to authenticate the Reddit API.

Your first request

The most common call reads a subreddit feed. Here is the same request in three languages, each returning clean JSON you can parse immediately.

curl

curl -X GET \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $REDDITAPIS_KEY" \
  "https://api.redditapis.com/api/reddit/posts?subreddit=programming&sort=new&limit=25"

Python

import os, requests

res = requests.get(
    "https://api.redditapis.com/api/reddit/posts",
    params={"subreddit": "programming", "sort": "new", "limit": 25},
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.getenv('REDDITAPIS_KEY')}"},
)
posts = res.json()

Node.js

const url = "https://api.redditapis.com/api/reddit/posts?subreddit=programming&sort=new&limit=25";
const res = await fetch(url, {
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.REDDITAPIS_KEY}` },
});
const posts = await res.json();

Full language walkthroughs live in the Python and Node.js answers. If your stack is neither, there are runnable clients for Go using nothing but net/http, and for Bun on its native fetch.

The endpoint catalog

Redditapis exposes 59 endpoints. The read tier holds 31 routes; the eleven listed below are the ones most projects call, and the tier also covers single comment lookups, the full comment tree under a post, and a batch comment-verify route. Reads are $0.002 each.

Several of these routes have a walkthrough of their own, with the response shape and the edge cases the table has no room for: user profiles, karma and history, images, videos and galleries, posting rules as JSON, moderators and the wiki, and hydrating many posts in one call instead of one request each.

The remaining tiers cover deep comment search, voting, writes, and direct messages. Prices rise with the action, since a write costs Reddit more than a read. Deep comment search is the one worth reading before you budget for it, since it is the route people reach for after Pushshift, and Reddit's own DM caps bound the messaging tier regardless of what you are willing to spend.

2 free account reads, 3 free feedback endpoints and10 plan-billed monitoring endpoints round out the 59: your own account details and payment history, a bug or feature report to the team and its status, and keyword monitors. For the count and the reasoning behind it, see how many Reddit API endpoints there are.

Pagination

Listing endpoints return results in pages. Each response includes an after token; pass it as a query parameter on the next request to pull the following page, and stop when the token comes back empty. That loop is how you pull a whole subreddit or a full comment history without hitting a single oversized response.

Rate limits

Redditapis meters by spend rather than by a strict per-minute cap, so throughput scales with your plan instead of a hard queue. If you send faster than the plan allows you get a 429, and the fix is to back off and retry. The official Reddit Data API, by contrast, caps the free OAuth tier near 100 queries per minute. The full breakdown, including how to avoid PRAW throttling, is on the rate limits answer. Two failure modes are worth recognising on sight because neither is really a rate limit: the "your request has been rate limited" page Reddit serves to logged-out traffic, and a job that works locally and dies in GitHub Actions, which is a datacentre-IP block wearing a 429's clothes.

Status codes and error handling

Pricing per call

Billing is usage-based, so you pay per call rather than for a monthly seat. A project that mostly reads posts and comments pays cents for thousands of calls, and the $0.50 in signup credits covers about 250 reads.

Run your own volume on the cost calculator, or read the full breakdown on the pricing page.

How this differs from the official Reddit API docs

Reddit maintains its own documentation at developers.reddit.com for the OAuth Data API. That path is free for personal, non-commercial use, but commercial access is sold by negotiated agreement at a reported $0.24 per 1,000 calls, which is $0.00024 per call, behind an app-review queue. The $12,000 figure widely quoted since 2023 is that same rate at 50 million requests, not a separate annual fee. Redditapis is a REST wrapper: one bearer token, no review, and flat per-call pricing from $0.002. Commercial keys on the official path also wait on manual app review before they go live, whereas a Redditapis key works the moment you generate it. Use the official docs when you need first-party OAuth scopes; use this guide when you want data in minutes without a contract. The side-by-side comparison is on the Redditapis versus official Reddit API page, and the official reference is at developers.reddit.com.

Frequently asked