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Reddit API Pricing in 2026: Free Limits, Approval, and What Commercial Access Costs

Reddit API pricing in 2026: the Responsible Builder Policy, the 100 QPM free limit, what $0.24 per 1K calls really was, Pushshift's status, and your options.

By Tarun Khatri · · 8 min read

Reddit API pricing in 2026 has two parts. Approved non-commercial use is free, at up to 100 queries per minute per OAuth client. Commercial use needs Reddit's explicit written approval, at a price Reddit does not publish. Since November 11, 2025, every new app needs approval, even for free access. This post covers what the Responsible Builder Policy changed, what the much-quoted "$0.24 per 1,000 calls" actually was, where Pushshift and its successors stand, and what options developers have, as of October 2026.

TL;DR

Question Answer (as of October 2026)
Is there a free tier? Yes, for approved non-commercial use
Free rate limit 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id, averaged over 10 minutes
Can I just register an app and start? No. Self-service access closed on November 11, 2025
Commercial use Needs explicit written approval; terms are negotiated, not published
Public price list None on Reddit's developer pages
The $0.24 per 1K calls figure Reddit's July 2023 rate for apps needing higher limits
Pushshift Restricted to approved moderators for moderation since 2023

The Responsible Builder Policy (November 2025)

On November 11, 2025, Reddit announced in r/redditdev that it was "requiring approval for any new OAuth tokens":

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.

Existing integrations kept working for anyone "acting within our policies." The same post says this follows an earlier change limiting accounts to one OAuth token each.

The Responsible Builder Policy itself sets the ground rules:

  • Approval is required before accessing any Reddit data through the API.
  • Be transparent. No registering multiple accounts or filing multiple requests for the same use case.
  • No unapproved commercialization or AI training. "You must not sell, license, share, or otherwise commercialize Reddit data without express written approval." This explicitly covers mining, scraping, ad targeting and training machine learning or AI models.
  • No sensitive inferences. No deriving health, political affiliation, sexual orientation and similar traits, and no re-identifying users.
  • Researchers go through the Reddit for Researchers program. The policy says research using Reddit data collected outside that program violates it.

Where you go depends on who you are. Developers are pointed to Devvit, Reddit's platform for apps that run on Reddit, and to a support ticket if Devvit can't do what they need. Moderators get their own request form, and researchers apply to the program.

Free tier limits

Reddit's Data API wiki states the free limit:

  • 100 queries per minute (QPM) per OAuth client id, averaged over a 10-minute window so short bursts are allowed.
  • Traffic without OAuth or login credentials "will be blocked."
  • A unique, descriptive User-Agent is required, in the form <platform>:<app ID>:<version string> (by /u/<username>). Generic ones like Python/urllib are "drastically limited."
  • You must delete content that has been deleted on Reddit, and Reddit "strongly recommend[s]" deleting stored user data and content within 48 hours.

Watch the X-Ratelimit-Used, X-Ratelimit-Remaining and X-Ratelimit-Reset headers to stay inside the limit.

The rate limit is generous. 100 QPM is 144,000 requests a day, and a listing can return up to 100 items per request (Reddit's API reference gives limit a maximum of 100). The real constraints are approval and permitted use, not throughput.

Reddit API pricing for commercial use

The policy is short on this point: "If you'd like to use Reddit data for commercial purposes, you'll need to get explicit written approval." You submit a request through Reddit's support form, and Reddit says it will be in touch "if your proposal fits our criteria."

Reddit doesn't publish commercial rates. The wiki defers to the Developer Terms and Data API Terms, and neither is a price list. Unless a per-call price for 2026 comes from Reddit itself, treat it as a guess.

What "$0.24 per 1,000 API calls" really was

This figure is real, and it came from Reddit. In the June 9, 2023 post "Addressing the community about changes to our API", CEO Steve Huffman wrote:

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).

The same post set the free limits at 100 QPM with OAuth and 10 QPM without. The no-OAuth allowance is gone now.

Its effect is best known from Apollo. Developer Christian Selig wrote after his call with Reddit that "50 million requests costs $12,000", which matches $0.24 per 1,000. Apollo had made 7 billion requests the previous month, so he estimated about $1.7 million a month, or $20 million a year. Apollo, Reddit is Fun and Sync announced they would close before the pricing took effect.

Two cautions if you quote this number today:

  1. It was priced per call, not per item. A listing call can return up to 100 posts, so $0.24 per 1,000 calls could work out to well under a cent per 1,000 posts, if you can get that rate.
  2. It applied to apps that needed limits above the free tier, and it came before the November 2025 approval process. We found no public statement from Reddit confirming that $0.24 still applies to new agreements, so treat it as history, not a quote.

Pushshift, Arctic Shift and PullPush

Pushshift was the archive most Reddit research relied on. In May 2023, Pushshift and its operator NCRI announced an agreement with Reddit under which access would return only for verified moderators, each with Reddit's explicit approval, and "limited to moderation use cases only." It added that "access to Pushshift data for research purposes is not available at this time." We found no later official announcement reopening it to the public.

Arctic Shift is a community project that publishes Reddit data dumps, a download tool for individual users and smaller subreddits, a limited API and a web search, with a form for removal requests.

PullPush offers a search API over comments and submissions. Its site credits community-compiled BitTorrent dumps of Reddit data, it runs its own removal-request system, and it has its own terms of service. We couldn't confirm how current its coverage is, so check before relying on it.

Before building on either, note that Reddit's policy says research using Reddit data collected outside the Reddit for Researchers program violates it. It also bars commercializing Reddit data without written approval. Deletions are another gap: Reddit asks API users to remove deleted content, but PullPush says it can't remove data from the BitTorrent dumps it builds on. Read the policies and decide with your own counsel.

What options developers have

  1. Build on Devvit if your app lives inside Reddit, such as a mod tool, game or community feature. This is the route Reddit actively points developers to.
  2. Request Data API access through Reddit's support form, explaining a specific, non-commercial use case. If approved, you get the free 100 QPM.
  3. Apply to Reddit for Researchers if you're doing academic research.
  4. Negotiate a commercial agreement if you're a business using Reddit data in a product. Expect a sales process, not a price page.
  5. Use an archive for historical bulk data, with the policy caveats above.
  6. Use a third-party data API. Several services return public Reddit data without you registering a Reddit app, including ours, Weir, and others we cover in our Reddit API alternatives guide. Using a third party doesn't change what Reddit's policies say about how Reddit data may be used, and Weir is not affiliated with or endorsed by Reddit. Whether your use is appropriate is for you, and your lawyer, to judge.

What a third-party API costs, worked out

Here is the arithmetic for Weir, since it's the one we can speak for. A Reddit post or comment costs 3 credits, a community or user profile 1, and every successful call has a 1-credit minimum. Failed calls cost nothing. Packs run from $5 for 25,000 credits to $1,000 for 10,000,000, so 1,000 Reddit posts cost between $0.60 and $0.30, plus 5,000 free credits a month (pricing).

A daily watch on three subreddits that finds about 40 new posts a day:

(40 posts x 3 credits) + 1 minimum = 121 credits per run
121 x 30 days = 3,630 credits per month (inside the 5,000 free credits)

Reading 100,000 Reddit comments for an analysis project:

100,000 x 3 = 300,000 credits, plus 1 credit per page
At the $50 pack rate ($50 / 340,000 credits): about $44 plus page minimums

Per item, that is more than Reddit's 2023 commercial rate, if you can get approved for it. What you pay for is skipping the application and a single key that also covers X. If you already have approved Data API access and your use fits Reddit's policy, the official API is the cheaper route.

Doing it with Weir

A search across a few subreddits for the past day:

curl https://api.weirapp.io/v1/reddit/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEIR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "\"api pricing\"", "subreddits": ["redditdev", "webdev"], "sort": "new", "time": "week", "limit": 10}'

Results come back in Reddit's own field names (title, selftext, score, numComments, permalink), and meta.nextCursor pages forward. Reddit's search covers titles and post bodies, not comments, so to catch mentions in comments, read a subreddit's comment stream with GET /v1/reddit/subreddits/{name}/comments or set up a monitor. You can sign up and try it on the free monthly credits, or start with the quickstart. For the X side of the same question, see X API pricing in 2026.

Sources

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