Prepare access for the two-week collection
Choose where the AskSocialScience collection will run before opening the account form. A private server process can hold the credential while the shared research journal records dates, filters and decisions. Keep those roles separate: a colleague should be able to inspect the collection method without receiving the account secret. The panel on this page manages your redditcollector.com account, balance and invoices; it does not create a shared account across other domains.
Prepare the credential for both dated AskSocialScience runs during signup; changing from and to for the second week does not require another account. Register with an email address and a password of 12–72 UTF-8 bytes, remembering that some characters occupy several bytes. The key appears once, immediately after successful signup and before payment. Copy it into the private secret store for your runner before returning to the collection brief. In that brief, record which configuration each week's run used, without the key value. One-time display does not make the key single-use, and neither email nor a later login supplies another copy. Signup needs no Google login, wallet connection or wallet address. Budget the pilot from the actual balance: the possible 100 trial credits depend on network-wide anti-abuse eligibility.
Connect the private collection runner
Configure the runner with X-API-Key: <key> or Authorization: Bearer <key>; both headers are accepted. Keep the value in server-side secret configuration, outside notebook exports, public repositories and response logs. The panel's Secure HttpOnly session cookie is for account access, not a substitute for a retrieval header. A project name in your own journal is just a local label, not an API feature or a separate set of credits.
Give the pilot its own request allowance
If the account receives the conditional 100 trial credits under network-wide anti-abuse rules, reserve a few for inspecting up to three AskSocialScience posts. Trial credit is not guaranteed. Each successful retrieval, including an empty response, spends one credit. Check the HTTP result before continuing: 401 concerns the key, 402 the balance and 429 request frequency. A static response from /v1/status does not validate your key or test the archive's upstream availability.
Fund the session and handle key changes
For paid work, $1 buys 1000 successful requests; the minimum $50 top-up adds 50000 paid credits, with no subscription or expiry. Sign in and create a server invoice before transferring. Use its recipient and exact amount with USDT on TRON TRC20 or USDC on Ethereum mainnet ERC20. The invoice expires in one hour. Submit the transaction hash for verification of a genuine confirmed matching transfer. Provider outages may leave it pending; settlement is not instantaneous or guaranteed within a stated time.
A signed-in user can regenerate the key by confirming the password; the old key stops working immediately. Pause your local runner and update its secret before resuming. There is no emailed key or password-reset feature. The widget retains invoice and user identifiers per hostname in localStorage for invoice recovery, not the raw key. A lost client response can follow a charged success; another successful attempt spends another credit. Upstream failure instead refunds the reservation.
