Reddit API pricing in 2026, and what’s still free

Reddit’s Data API is free for approved, non-commercial apps at 100 queries per minute, and commercial use needs a contract at a price Reddit doesn’t publish (the only rate it has given, in June 2023, is $0.24 per 1,000 calls). Reddit stops accepting new requests for public API access on October 31, 2026, and closes what’s left of public access in March 2027.

Reddit API pricing, limits and dates here were checked against Reddit’s own pages on October 10, 2026. LurkAPI’s Reddit search endpoint returns public Reddit posts as JSON for 1 credit a call ($0.45 to $0.90 per 1,000).

What Reddit’s API costs in 2026

Free access is for non-commercial use. For anything commercial, Reddit’s help page Developer Platform & Accessing Reddit Data says: “you’ll need our permission, and we’ll require a contract.” Section 3.1 of the Data API Terms (last revised July 20, 2026) reserves the right to charge fees, “rates to be determined at Reddit’s sole discretion,” and requires “a separate agreement with Reddit” for commercial use, “research in excess of rate limits,” or anything else the terms don’t expressly permit.

Reddit counts as commercial “any use of our services by a business or on behalf of a business or as part of a monetized product or service.” Among its examples:

• Mobile apps with ads, promos, or paywalls
• Services, research, or data access for fees
• Subscription services
• Free product features available for upsell

The same page rules out pairing Reddit content with ads: “You cannot display Reddit content and run advertisements within your app, website, or other services.”

There is no price list. The one rate Reddit has published came on June 2, 2023 from u/FlyingLaserTurtle, who wrote Reddit’s API announcement that week, in a comment under it: “Our pricing is $0.24 per 1000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app.” The comment’s example: an app with 1,000 daily users making 100 calls a day each pays $8,760 a year; at 345 calls a day each, $30,222.

That rate isn’t self-serve. The 2023 announcement called its enterprise tier “a privilege that we will extend to select partners based on a number of factors,” and the Responsible Builder Policy says Reddit’s team “will be in touch if your proposal fits our criteria.” The help page adds that “Bulk exporting of Reddit data will be significantly limited by default” and that “select developers who require broader access to Reddit data may be charged fees to lift those limits.”

Reddit API rate limits

Reddit’s Data API Wiki (updated May 11, 2026) sets the free limit at “100 queries per minute (QPM) per OAuth client id”, averaged “over a time window (currently 10 minutes) to support bursting requests.” Free access also caps chat at 2,000 messages a day per recipient and 3,000 a day in total. Every client has to “authenticate with a registered OAuth token”, and default User-Agents “like ‘Python/urllib’ or ‘Java’” are “drastically limited”. The wiki lists the headers to watch:

X-Ratelimit-Used: Approximate number of requests used in this period
X-Ratelimit-Remaining: Approximate number of requests left to use
X-Ratelimit-Reset: Approximate number of seconds to end of period

From July 1, 2023, Reddit allowed 10 queries per minute without OAuth and 100 with it, replacing the 60 it had documented before (r/redditdev, May 31, 2023). The no-OAuth tier is gone: “Traffic not using OAuth or login credentials will be blocked, and the default rate limit will not apply.”

Who can still get access, and until when

Since November 11, 2025, nobody gets a key without asking. Reddit’s post on r/redditdev that day: “Starting today, self-service access to Reddit’s public data API will be closed. Anyone looking to build with Reddit data, whether you’re a developer, researcher, or moderator, will need to request approval before gaining access.” Apps that already had access kept it.

On August 5, 2026, Reddit said the public Data API would give way to its Developer Platform, because the API “wasn’t built for today’s scale, automated abuse, or commercial scraping.” On September 30 it published the dates.

A reply in the August 5 thread says partners with written agreements will be exempt. u/pl00h wrote: “We’ll have exemptions for partners with written agreements in place like accessibility apps or mobile clients, like Narwhal, that require public API access.”

After October 31, a new app can’t request Data API access. An existing app that hasn’t registered starts losing access on January 12, 2027, and registered apps without a written agreement have until March 2027.

How to request access before October 31

1. Read the Responsible Builder Policy (updated October 5, 2026). It requires “explicit approval before accessing any Reddit data through our API”, sends non-commercial developers to the Developer Platform, and asks for “explicit written approval” for commercial use.
2. File Reddit’s request form. One form takes three request types: developer, enterprise (commercial) and researcher, which is the application to Reddit for Researchers.
3. If an app already uses the API, register it. Registering by November 30, 2026 is also how you apply to the $1M App Migration Program, which pays $1,000 to eligible apps that migrate.
4. Send a User-Agent in Reddit’s format, <platform>:<app ID>:<version string> (by /u/<reddit username>). The wiki’s rule: “NEVER lie about your User-Agent.”

One user reported on r/redditdev on October 8, 2026 that forms get no reply: “You can’t even register an app commercially to use it, no responses are given when submitting the forms.” Once approved, you have to delete anything that’s been deleted on Reddit, and Reddit “strongly recommend[s] routinely deleting any stored user data and content within 48 hours.”

What a logged-out request gets now

We sent one request without an OAuth token from a cloud server on October 9, 2026:

GET https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/top.json?limit=5

HTTP 403
content-type: text/html
cache-control: private, no-store
retry-after: 0
server: snooserv

You've been blocked by network security. If you think you've been blocked by mistake, file a ticket below and we'll look into it.

The 403 came back in 39 ms with no x-ratelimit-* headers, so it was a block, not a rate limit. A descriptive User-Agent got the same 403, and so did oauth.reddit.com without a token (a 403, not a 401). Reddit’s help page gives the reason: “If you’re accessing Reddit from an IP address in a hosted service provider’s netblock, you will be required to have a valid OAuth token or be logged in.”

What’s still free

None of these covers commercial use. Research goes through Reddit for Researchers, for approved non-commercial projects, and the help page says: “Using developer tools, APIs, or unauthorized third-party tools for academic research is a violation of our policies.”

Reddit’s rate vs ours at 10k, 100k and 1M calls

Per call, Reddit’s last published rate is cheaper than our lowest price ($0.45 per 1,000 with the Scale pack), and an approved non-commercial app pays nothing.

Assumptions: a 30-day month. An approved non-commercial app pays $0 for all three; 1,000,000 calls is about 23 QPM on average, under the 100 QPM cap, which allows at most 4,320,000 calls a month. LurkAPI is 1 credit per Reddit call, priced at the cheapest packs that cover each volume on our pricing page, and credits don’t expire.

Per item, the gap is wider. A Reddit listing call returns up to 100 items (the limit parameter’s maximum in Reddit’s API docs), and our subreddit posts endpoint returns about 25 posts a page. So 1,000 posts from a subreddit are 10 calls at Reddit, $0.0024 at $0.24 per 1,000, and 40 calls with us: $0.036 at Starter prices, $0.018 at Scale.

With an approved key or a contract, Reddit is cheaper per call and per item, and you should use it. All five Reddit endpoints on LurkAPI read reddit.com’s public pages and return posts, comments and subreddits for 1 credit a call, with the same key that covers our other platforms.

Searching Reddit with one request

curl -G https://api.lurkapi.com/v1/reddit/search \
  --data-urlencode "query=reddit api pricing" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LURK_KEY"

{
  "success": true,
  "credits_charged": 1,
  "posts": [
    {
      "id": "1wzrjba",
      "title": "Reddit Announces End of 3rd Party API in March 2027",
      "subreddit_name_prefixed": "r/DystopiaForReddit",
      "permalink": "/r/DystopiaForReddit/comments/1wzrjba/reddit_announces_end_of_3rd_party_api_in_march/",
      "score": 68,
      "num_comments": 47,
      "created_at_iso": "2026-10-07T08:52:55.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "1x0nn0k",
      "title": "Reddit API changes",
      "subreddit_name_prefixed": "r/redditdev",
      "permalink": "/r/redditdev/comments/1x0nn0k/reddit_api_changes/",
      "score": 24,
      "num_comments": 9,
      "created_at_iso": "2026-10-08T10:41:51.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "after": "eyJjYW5kaWRh…"
}

This call, on October 9, 2026, cost 1 credit and took 1.7 s. Of its 7 posts, four were about Reddit’s API (three from October 7 and 8, one from October 2025) and three were about other products’ APIs and API spending. To read a thread, pass its permalink as url to post comments. The free Reddit scraper exports a subreddit’s posts to CSV without an account.

Reddit’s terms on what you do with its data still apply to you; this isn’t legal advice.