The read-and-write Scrape Creators alternative for Reddit

Video intelligence: transcripts elsewhere, video posts on Reddit

A large part of Scrape Creators' appeal is video. Its catalogue reaches the short-form platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, and teams use it to pull video metadata and transcripts so a model can read what was said rather than only the caption. If spoken content on those platforms is your core input, that breadth is the reason to keep it.

Reddit video is a different shape. A video on Reddit is a post: it has a title, a subreddit, a score and, most usefully, a comment thread where people argue about what the clip shows. Redditapis treats it that way. GET /search/media takes a query and a kind of image, video, gallery or all, and returns only the matching media posts, with the same sorts and time filters as ordinary search. The comment tree for any of those posts is one more read. For most Reddit research the discussion under a video carries more signal than a transcript of the video itself, and it is text you can analyse directly.

Is social media scraping legal?

It depends on what you collect, how you collect it and what you do with it, and this is general information rather than legal advice. In the United States two decisions shape the debate. Van Buren v. United States (2021) narrowed what counts as exceeding authorized access under the federal anti-hacking law, and in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn the Ninth Circuit held in 2022 that scraping pages anyone can view without logging in is unlikely to be unauthorized access under that law. Neither ruling makes a platform's terms disappear: hiQ went on to lose on breach of contract, and platforms enforce their terms in court.

Reddit is an active example. Its user agreement and developer terms restrict bulk and commercial use of its data without an agreement, and in 2025 it sued an AI company over the use of Reddit content. Personal data adds a second layer: usernames and comment histories can be personal data under the GDPR and similar laws, so storing them needs a purpose and a retention limit. The practical rules are the same whichever vendor you use. Collect what your use case needs, respect deletions, do not rebuild profiles of individuals, and read our responsible builder policy for how we expect the API to be used.

Moving a Reddit job off Scrape Creators

A Reddit workload usually moves in an afternoon, because the inputs are the same: a subreddit, a search term, a post id or a username. The order that avoids surprises:

1. List the Reddit calls your job makes today and map each to its endpoint here: subreddit listings to GET /posts, keyword search to GET /search, a thread to GET /post/:id/comments, a profile to GET /user/:name.
2. Swap the key for one bearer token in the Authorization header. There is no Reddit developer app to register and no OAuth flow.
3. Run both side by side for a day on the same inputs and compare counts. Listings return up to 100 items a page with an after cursor, so ask for full pages and follow the cursor until it is empty.
4. Add what the old setup could not do, if you need it: comment, vote and DM endpoints, or a monitor that pushes new matching posts to your webhook instead of polling.
5. Keep Scrape Creators for the non-Reddit platforms. Many teams run both, one per job.

What a Reddit workload costs here

Reads are $0.0015 a call whatever the volume (source: our published pricing), and a call that returns 100 posts costs the same as one that returns 1. There is no credit pack to size, so the bill is calls times the rate:

Five questions to ask any Reddit data vendor

Whichever vendor you pick, these questions decide whether a Reddit workload runs cleanly for a year or needs rework in a month. Our own answers are next to each one so you can compare like for like.

1. Is a call priced the same at every volume? A rate that depends on the plan you bought makes the cost of a backfill hard to predict. Here a read is one flat price whatever you spend.
2. How deep does a comment thread go? Many scrapers return the first page of comments only. A comment-tree call here returns the post with up to 500 top-level comments.
3. What happens when Reddit has a bad hour? Ask whether a failed upstream call is billed. A call that returns an error from Reddit's side should not cost you a read.
4. Can you be told about new posts, or only poll for them? Polling a search every few minutes is the most expensive way to watch a topic. A monitor that pushes each new match to your webhook costs less and arrives sooner.
5. Can you act on what you read? If a workflow will ever need to reply, vote or message, check now that the same key can do it, rather than adding a second vendor later.

Running both side by side

Teams that keep Scrape Creators for video usually split the work by source rather than by feature. The Reddit jobs move to a Reddit-specific key and the TikTok, YouTube and Instagram jobs stay where they are, so each bill maps to one platform and a change on one side never breaks the other. Two habits make the split painless. Store each item with the platform it came from and the time you read it, so a dashboard can join Reddit threads to short-form videos on the same topic without guessing which vendor produced which row. And keep one shared list of the topics and brands you track, so a keyword added for TikTok is also searched on Reddit the same day instead of drifting out of sync over a few weeks.

When Scrape Creators is still the better pick

Pick Scrape Creators when Reddit is one source among many and you want one vendor and one invoice across all of them, when video transcripts are the input you need, or when you buy credits in advance and like that they never expire. Pick a dedicated Reddit API when Reddit is the main source, when you need to read deep comment threads or search inside them, when you need to post, vote or send DMs, or when you want new matches pushed to you rather than fetched on a schedule.