Reddit API pricing in 2026: official terms vs per-call

Reddit API pricing has no public price list. Reddit's free tier allows 100 queries per minute per registered app, for non-commercial use. Commercial use, or research above that limit, needs a separate agreement with Reddit, priced in the contract. The per-1,000-call figure you see everywhere is a 2023 quote to one app, and it was never on a Reddit page.

Why ask now? On 2026-09-30 Reddit announced that public Data API access closes in March 2027 (TechCrunch, read 2026-10-24). Whatever free access you use today has an end date. This post sets out what Reddit's own terms say about cost, where the 2023 number comes from, what it adds up to, and what per-call providers charge for the same reads, so you can budget before March.

What does the official Reddit API cost?

Nothing up to a rate limit, then a contract. Reddit's Data API wiki sets the free limit at 100 queries per minute per OAuth client id, averaged over 10 minutes, for apps eligible for free access. Clients without OAuth are blocked. Above that, or for any commercial use, Reddit's terms send you to a separate agreement.

The terms also say Reddit "reserves the right to charge fees for future use", at rates it sets. So the free tier is a policy, not a promise.

Where does the 2023 per-1,000-call price come from?

From one developer's call with Reddit in 2023. Apollo's developer, Christian Selig, said Reddit quoted about $12,000 per 50 million requests, which is $0.24 per 1,000. A Reddit spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the figure was "pricing per 1,000 API calls" (The Verge, 2023-05-31, read 2026-10-24).

That number is a quote to one large app, three years old. Reddit has never put it on a pricing page, and its terms today say only that commercial access is set in a separate agreement. Use it to get the order of magnitude, not to plan a budget. If Reddit data is the base of your product, ask Reddit for a quote.

What would Reddit API pricing add up to?

At the 2023 rate, small jobs cost little and big apps cost millions. Apollo made 7 billion requests in a month, which The Verge put at $1.7 million a month, or about $20 million a year, at that rate (The Verge, read 2026-10-24). The lesson is the multiplier: an app that thousands of people open again and again makes calls fast.

The free tier sets a ceiling too. 100 queries a minute is 6,000 an hour and 144,000 a day for one OAuth client, if you run all day at the limit. That is plenty for a research script or a moderation bot, and not much for an app with thousands of users who share one client id.

Three things make a real count higher than your estimate:

1. Pagination. A listing returns a page of posts, so 1,000 posts takes several calls, not one.
2. Comments. A thread with hundreds of comments needs extra calls to expand the collapsed ones.
3. Polling. Checking a subreddit every minute for new posts is 1,440 calls a day, even on quiet days.

What do per-call providers charge for Reddit data?

Third-party providers read public Reddit posts and sell each lookup per call, with no contract or minimum. looot resells several of them through one balance. The table reads the cheapest live price for each job from the looot catalog when the page loads, so it changes when a provider changes its price.

To compare with the 2023 rate, multiply the price per call by 1,000. Then ask the same three questions a price list hides: is a miss billed, how many results come back per call, and does a retry cost twice. Test on 20 of your own queries before you run 1,000. The same arithmetic for other jobs is in what 1,000 lookups cost, and the ranked view of Reddit providers is the best Reddit APIs.

Official Reddit API or a per-call provider?

Pick by what you are building. The official route gives you rights and a deadline; a provider gives you speed and no rights.

The dates behind the first row, and the App Migration Program for Devvit, are in the Reddit API shutdown post. The how-to for each call, with what it returns, is in Reddit API for agents, and the job page is Reddit search API.

Price a Reddit job before you run it

Searching the catalog and pricing it are free; only a run is charged.

What this post does not cover

• We did not get a quote from Reddit. Commercial prices are set in each agreement, and nothing above replaces asking Reddit.
• looot has no licence from Reddit. The providers in the table collect public posts, and Reddit's March 2027 change targets that kind of collection, so any of them may stop. Check each endpoint's status in the Reddit platform page before a large job.
• Per-call reads do not give you rights to the data. Reddit's terms forbid training a model on posts without the rightsholders' permission, whoever fetched them.
• It covers reading public posts and comments only: no posting, voting, private subreddits or messages.

Last checked 2026-10-24 against Reddit's Data API wiki and Data API Terms, the sources linked above and the live looot catalog.