To watch Reddit for keywords and brand mentions you either pay a fixed monthly tool or build exactly what you need on an API. Redditapis is the build side: search, comment search, and subreddit streams over REST, billed per call.
The Redditapis Reddit Monitoring API is a REST Reddit monitoring API for building your own keyword tracking, brand-mention monitoring, and lead finding. Search, comment search, and subreddit streams over HTTPS, billed flat per call from $0.002 a read, with no Reddit developer-app approval required. Pay-per-call pricing from $0.002 per read. No subscription.
Written by Emma, developer relations at Redditapis. We bill reads at a flat $0.002 per call (source: our published pricing), so a monitor that polls your keywords costs exactly what it uses, with no monthly seat.
What is a Reddit monitoring API?
A Reddit monitoring API is a REST endpoint you poll to track keywords, brand mentions, and conversations across Reddit, instead of paying a fixed monthly SaaS. Subscription tools do the polling and dashboards for you and suit non-developers well. An API suits teams who want to own the pipeline: Redditapis gives you search, comment search, and subreddit streams over plain HTTPS, so you build a monitor that polls your keywords, dedupes results, and alerts your own way, billed a flat rate per call from $0.002 a read with no seat and no app approval.
The buy side
Tools like SubHunt, RedShip, Octolens, GummySearch, Syften, and F5Bot are capable, well-built products. They watch Reddit for your keywords and alert you, with no code to write. If you want monitoring handled end to end and their workflow fits yours, a subscription is a genuinely good option. If GummySearch was that tool, it closed in November 2025, and the GummySearch alternative page maps the migration.
Subscription Reddit-monitoring tools like SubHunt, RedShip, Octolens, GummySearch, Syften, and F5Bot run the polling, storage, and dashboards for you. You sign in, add keywords, and read results. Nothing to host or maintain.
These are polished products aimed at marketers and founders who do not want to write code. That is a real strength: a team with no engineer can be watching Reddit for their brand in minutes.
The subscription model is a recurring plan rather than metered usage. It is predictable, and for steady day-to-day monitoring at a set of keywords it is often the simplest path.
Keyword rules, dedupe logic, alert channels, and data retention are defined by the tool. That is convenient when their model matches yours, and a constraint when you need a shape they do not offer.
Want the numbers against one specific tool? Head-to-head breakdowns cover pricing, channels, and result caps.
The same three primitives power keyword tracking, brand-mention alerts, and lead finding, on a pipeline you own.
Poll posts for your keywords, brand names, and competitors by subreddit, query, and sort order over a plain REST endpoint. This is the core of any monitor.
Search comments as well as posts, so a mention buried three replies deep in a thread still surfaces. Most conversations that matter happen in the comments.
Pull the newest posts from the subreddits you care about, so you can watch a community end to end rather than only keyword hits.
Pay per request from $0.002 a read, with no monthly seat. A quiet week of polling costs less than a busy one, and cost tracks your real volume.
Subscription monitoring tool
Redditapis
How it works
A monitor is a loop: search your keyword, keep the newest results, skip ids you have already seen, and alert on the rest. Here is the search poll at the center of that loop, sorted newest-first over plain HTTPS:
curl "https://api.redditapis.com/api/reddit/search?q=your-brand&sort=new&limit=100" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"The response is JSON over HTTPS, so it drops into any language. Swap the endpoint for search/comments to catch mentions inside threads. Endpoint paths and parameters live in the API docs. Run the numbers for your volume with the cost calculator, or see the full per-endpoint rates on the pricing page. Before you wire up continuous monitoring, get a quick read on a subreddit's current size and activity with the free subreddit stats checker. If a single subreddit does not cover your whole audience, the free similar subreddits finder surfaces the adjacent communities worth monitoring alongside it.
Redditapis does not run an AI step on your matches today, no sentiment score, no lead classifier, no auto-generated summary. What it delivers instead is the input those need: every match, from a search poll or a signed webhook, arrives as one structured JSON object carrying the full post or comment text, author, subreddit, score, permalink, and timestamp. Pipe that straight into your own model for lead scoring, reply drafting, or a daily digest, without scraping HTML or reverse-engineering Reddit's own rate limits first.
Want the query layer on its own, or to feed live Reddit context to an agent? The search endpoint and the AI-agent integration each have a dedicated page.
A monitor is only as good as what it watches. Picking targets starts with the ranked subreddit list pulled straight from the API, and reading the results in context means knowing when a subreddit is actually awake, since a thread that surfaces at a dead hour behaves nothing like the same thread at peak. If the point of the alert is to reach the person who posted, DM outreach tooling compared against building on the API directly covers where the off-the-shelf tools stop and what the limits are on the other side.
Most people arrive here after trying a finished tool and hitting a wall in it. Each of these is genuinely better than an API for someone, and the honest question is whether you are that someone.
Syften is the one to beat on speed. It is built for fast Reddit keyword alerts and delivers them into Slack without you writing anything. If a low-latency alert in a channel is the whole job, it does that job and an API does not do it for you. Full Syften comparison.
F5Bot is free and emails you on keyword hits. For one person watching a few terms it is hard to argue with, and the reason to leave is filtering and volume rather than price. Full F5Bot comparison.
Octolens layers relevance scoring on top of raw mentions, which is the part teams most often try to rebuild themselves and underestimate. Full Octolens comparison.
Reddit's official API is free. The costs are the developer-app approval and the rate limits, which is exactly the trade this page exists to explain. Full comparison against the official API.
The pattern across all four: a tool decides what counts as a match and you live with that decision. An API hands you the matches and the decision, which is worth paying for only once that decision is something you actually want to own. If you are still weighing the wider field, the full provider comparison covers the data side rather than the alerting side.
A Reddit monitoring API is a REST endpoint you poll to track keywords, brand mentions, and conversations across Reddit, then dedupe and alert however you want. Instead of a fixed monthly tool, you call search, comment search, and subreddit streams directly and own the pipeline end to end, paying per call.
Both are valid. Subscription tools like SubHunt, RedShip, Octolens, GummySearch, Syften, and F5Bot are capable, no-code products for non-developers who want it managed. An API fits teams who want to own the keyword rules, dedupe logic, alert channels, and data, paying per call rather than a monthly seat.
Three cover most monitors: post search to catch keyword mentions in submissions, comment search to catch mentions inside threads, and subreddit streams to watch whole communities. All three return JSON over one REST API, so a single integration powers keyword tracking, brand-mention alerts, and lead finding.
Comment search is its own endpoint, separate from post search, because most brand mentions land in replies rather than in the submission itself. Poll it on the same keywords you already track, dedupe on the comment id, and you catch conversations a post-only monitor never sees. On the managed side, comment monitoring is included from the Growth plan up.
No. There is no Reddit developer-app review, no OAuth client registration, and no approval wait with Redditapis. You create an account, get a bearer token, and call the REST endpoints directly. That removes the 2-to-4-week gate the official Reddit Data API puts in front of new projects.
Dedupe on the item id Reddit returns for every post and comment. Store the ids you have already seen and skip them on the next poll, so a keyword that stays on a thread for days only alerts you once. Because you own the pipeline, the dedupe rule is entirely yours.
Pricing is flat and per-call, from $0.002 per read, with $0.50 in free credits at signup and no card, about 250 reads free. Votes, writes, and DMs are priced at $0.005, $0.012, and $0.025. See the pricing page and cost calculator to estimate spend.
A Reddit monitoring API is a REST endpoint you poll to track keywords, brand mentions, and conversations across Reddit. Redditapis gives you two ways to run that, and which one fits depends on whether you want to own the pipeline or hand it off. Build it yourself on search, comment search, and subreddit streams over plain HTTPS, billed a flat $0.002 per read with no app approval, and you control the polling, the dedupe, and how alerts reach you. Or start a plan from $19 a month and we run the keyword monitors and signed webhook delivery for you, so alerts arrive without you maintaining a poller.
By the numbers
Every Redditapis figure resolves to our published per-call rates; every external figure is a primary US source.
Redditapis bills reads at $0.002 per call, votes at $0.005, writes at $0.012, and DMs at $0.025, one flat rate for every account with no minimum spend. (Redditapis pricing, 2026)
Every new account starts with $0.50 in free credits and no card on file, enough for roughly 250 reads before any charge. (Redditapis, 2026)
Reddit's own commercial Data API is priced at $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, the rate that ended third-party apps like Apollo in 2023. (The Verge, 2023)
Reddit's free Data API tier is capped at 100 queries per minute per OAuth client, and 10 queries per minute without OAuth. (Reddit Data API Wiki, 2026)
Reddit signed a reported $60 million-a-year deal to license its data for AI training, a sign of how valuable structured Reddit data has become. (Reuters, 2024)
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$0.50 in free credits, no card required. Poll Reddit for your keywords and mentions over REST, billed per call from $0.002 a read.