Begin your Reddit collection with a research brief

Plan a Reddit data collection with a written brief, explicit UTC dates and a small AskSocialScience request. Historical retrieval without a complete or random sample promise.

Get API key

Request example

cURL

curl --fail-with-body -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" "https://api.redditcollector.com/v1/posts?subreddit=AskSocialScience&limit=3"

Define the question before collecting posts

Reddit Collector is a Reddit data collection API for social research teams working with an independent historical archive. It is not official or affiliated with Reddit and does not provide live data. Start with a bounded question about the material you intend to examine, rather than treating the archive as a census of a community or a measure of public opinion.

A collection brief records the community, unit of analysis, intended period, inclusion rules and stopping rule. Decide whether you are studying posts, comments or relationships visible among received records. Document why a keyword or minimum score belongs in your selection. Those choices can exclude relevant material; neither a score threshold nor a small first page is a random or representative sample.

The archive does not guarantee complete coverage, immutable results, a fixed schema or permanent access to a record. Keep the responses you actually use alongside your brief and local processing notes. A saved copy supports revisiting your own analysis; repeating the remote query does not guarantee an identical collection. Missing records remain a limitation to report, not evidence that a discussion never happened.

Try a bounded AskSocialScience page

Use GET https://api.redditcollector.com/v1/posts?subreddit=AskSocialScience&limit=3. The posts route restricts content to posts, subreddit selects AskSocialScience and limit requests up to three records. Page one is the default. Authenticate server-side with X-API-Key: <key> or Authorization: Bearer <key>; either header is supported. Keep the secret out of shared notebooks and public collection logs.

Illustrative synthetic fragment, not a real response: {"data":[],"pagination":{"page":1,"limit":3,"total":0,"relation":"eq"},"credits":{"cost":1,"balance":99}}. The balance is fictional. This successful empty first page costs one credit and supplies no posts to code. It does not establish the community's historical posting volume. The displayed request has no date bounds: add from and to before using it for a period-specific study.

Inspect received data before extracting quotations or coding themes locally. from and to use YYYY-MM-DD in UTC against created_utc, with the complete to day included. Internal _doc order is not chronology, relevance, score or random selection. A date condition controls inclusion separately from order. Fields may be missing; record how you handle an unavailable timestamp or conversation link instead of supplying an invented value.

Plan access and the request budget

The pricing model is straightforward: $1 per 1,000 successful retrieval requests, with each request costing one credit. Empty pages and successful repeats also count. The minimum paid top-up of $50 adds 50000 credits. There are no subscriptions and paid credits do not expire. Invalid requests do not debit; upstream failures refund reservations. Losing a response can conceal a billed success, so a successful retry costs another credit.

Signup uses email and a password of 12–72 UTF-8 bytes. The key appears once immediately, before payment. Possible 100 trial credits depend on network-wide anti-abuse eligibility. Account, key and balance belong to redditcollector.com. The Get API key page contains the account panel and password-confirmed key regeneration, which immediately invalidates the old key.

Log in and create an invoice before transferring USDT on TRON TRC20 or USDC ERC20 on Ethereum mainnet. Use its exact recipient and amount, then submit the transaction hash for verification. A matching genuine confirmed transfer must be verified; settlement time is not guaranteed. Read the documentation for route limits, pricing for billing and the guide for a dated collection recipe. Public /v1/status does not test search health.