Reddit Archive API: What Actually Works in 2026

A Reddit archive API is a programmatic interface over an independent copy of Reddit, including posts and comments that no longer exist on reddit.com. For most of the last decade that meant Pushshift. Pushshift lost its Reddit access in May 2023, and every tool built on top of it inherited a dataset that stopped growing.

This page covers what each remaining option returns today, what Reddit's own API allows and forbids, what an independent archive adds, and how to test any provider before you build on it. For the search side of the same problem, see Reddit archive search and our comparison of Pushshift alternatives.

Last verified: August 2026.

What happened to the Pushshift API?

Reddit revoked Pushshift's API access on 2 May 2023, and its real-time ingestion stopped the following month.

What survived is not the service developers remember. Pushshift now runs as a moderator-verified tool: you need a verified Reddit moderator account to get in, which rules it out for commercial work, academic work at scale, and anything an investigator would need to defend later. Jason Baumgartner stated in November 2025 that he no longer controls the domain. Any tutorial telling you to send an unauthenticated GET to api.pushshift.io is describing 2022.

The practical consequence is a hard stop in the data, not a slow decline. The corpus most OSINT tooling was built on simply has nothing after its cutoff, and no amount of retry logic will produce it.

Does the PullPush API still work?

PullPush still answers requests and still mirrors the old Pushshift parameter format, but its ingestion stopped in May 2025.

That parameter compatibility is why it is the first stop for anyone porting Pushshift code: the search routes take the same q, after and before arguments, so an old script runs unchanged. Coverage after 2023 was already partial, the published rate cap sits around 30 requests per minute, and outages are frequent. When we tested it on 30 July 2026, the newest content it would return was from May 2025.

A frozen archive fails quietly, which is the dangerous part. Your query returns HTTP 200 with a populated result array. Nothing tells you that the last fourteen months are missing. Before you trust any provider, ask it for the newest record it holds rather than checking whether the endpoint responds.

What does the Arctic Shift API cover, and where does it stop?

Arctic Shift is the best-maintained free option, roughly 2.5 billion items through February 2026, with bulk dumps that lag four to six weeks.

It offers a free API plus around 261 GB of Parquet files published on Hugging Face, updated monthly. For a researcher who can work offline and does not need this week's data, it is the correct choice, and it is the honest benchmark any paid provider should be compared against.

Where it stops matters if you are building something operational:

• No SLA, no support path, and no commercial terms. It is maintained by one person.

• Rate limits are whatever the host can afford this month, and they can change without notice.

• No stated hosting jurisdiction, which is a blocker for European public-sector buyers.

• The four to six week dump lag means it cannot be used for monitoring, only for retrospective work.

• Coverage of a specific subreddit or account is uneven and unmeasured, so you cannot state completeness in a report.

The other free route is the offline dumps on Academic Torrents, monthly zstandard-compressed NDJSON covering 2005 onward, around 3.97 TB in total. There is no query layer at all. You are signing up to build one, and to keep it fed. In July 2026 Reddit began moving against those public dumps, so treat their availability as a snapshot rather than a foundation.

What does Reddit's own API allow and forbid?

Reddit's Data API serves live content only, caps listings at roughly 1,000 items, and forbids licensed data from being used for surveillance or law enforcement.

Each of those is a separate wall, and they compound:

• It returns what Reddit currently shows. A comment the author deleted comes back with a body of [deleted]. Moderator-removed content comes back as [removed] or is absent from the tree entirely. The original text is not in the response because it is not in the public object.

• Listing endpoints paginate to about 1,000 items. You cannot walk a busy subreddit or a prolific account back to 2012, however patient your pagination loop is.

• Search is relevance-ranked over recent content. Relevance ranking decides what you are allowed to see, which is the opposite of what an exhaustive query needs.

• Commercial use is metered and paid. Non-commercial and moderation use stayed free after the 2023 repricing, but the free tier is not a licence to build a product on.

• Reddit's Public Content Policy of 7 May 2024 bars licensees from making Reddit content available to government bodies or third parties for surveillance, intelligence or law enforcement purposes. That is a policy constraint, not a technical one, and no engineering effort routes around it.

Reddit has also been enforcing. It sued Perplexity, Oxylabs, AWMProxy and SerpApi in October 2025 over indirect scraping through search engine results, and sued Anthropic in June 2025. Mandatory human verification for bot accounts arrived in March 2026, and old.reddit.com moved behind a login on 30 June 2026. The direction of travel is one way.

What does an independent archive API give you that Reddit's does not?

Five things: history that predates your first query, content captured before deletion, exhaustive keyword search, identity resolution across accounts, and low latency.

• Historical depth. THINKPOL holds 30 billion Reddit posts and comments from 2005 onward. You query the record as it stood at capture time, not as Reddit renders it today.

• Content captured before deletion. Stream ingestion writes the object seconds after publication, so the original body survives a user deletion, a moderator removal, an account deletion or a subreddit ban. Reddit's API cannot return text it no longer serves.

• Exhaustive keyword search. Word-token or exact-phrase matching across submissions and comments, bounded by a time window and paged by cursor, with no relevance model deciding what is worth showing you.

• Identity resolution. From one account you get associated accounts, cross-platform identifiers that appear in the archive, behavioural patterns and full history including edited and deleted material. An actor who erased their traces stays visible in the archive.

• Latency. Search returns in under 300 ms, new content lands in the archive around 15 seconds after publication, and the Live Firehose pushes keyword matches to a webhook on a 15-second interval.

One boundary worth stating plainly. An archive of this kind is a record of a public conversation, captured while it was public, retained under a stated lawful basis. It is not a source of credentials, private messages or breached material, and no provider should sell it as one.

How do you query a Reddit archive API?

Authenticate with a bearer token, then issue a GET against the search endpoint with your terms, a match mode, a time window and a cursor.

The shape of a THINKPOL search request:

GET /v3/search?terms=<keyword>&type=comment&mode=phrase&from=<unix>&to=<unix>&order=asc

with the header Authorization: Bearer <your key>. The parameters behave as follows:

• terms is required. Repeating it ANDs the terms together.

• type is comment or submission. Omit it to search both.

• mode is word or phrase. word matches tokens, phrase requires exact contiguous text, and word is the default.

• from and to are Unix timestamp bounds. from defaults to no lower bound, to defaults to now.

• order is desc or asc on created_utc, defaulting to desc, and after carries the cursor timestamp from the previous page.

From there you hydrate. GET /v2/user/{username}/posts and /v2/user/{username}/comments walk an account's history, GET /v2/posts/{id}/comments pulls a thread, and GET /v2/subreddit/{subreddit_name} gives community context. GET /quota returns the remaining quota on your key, which is the call to put in your monitoring. For continuous collection, POST /v1/streams registers a webhook with a selector list, capped at 100,000 active selectors per stream and 256 characters per selector.

Full parameter reference is in the Antechamber API documentation. If you want to see what the archive returns before writing any code, the free Reddit search tool runs the same query path in a browser.

How do you evaluate a Reddit data provider?

Ask five questions: what is the newest record you hold, how do you handle deletion, what are the rate limits, how did you measure coverage, and where are you hosted.

• Freshness. Not the phrase "real time" but a number: the p50 and p95 lag between publication and availability, per object type. Then test it yourself. Publish something, query for it, and time the gap.

• Coverage. A record count is not coverage. Ask for coverage of your entities, with the estimator used and an interval around it. A vendor who cannot describe the method is guessing, and so are you.

• Deletion handling. Does the record survive a user deletion, a moderator removal, an account deletion, a subreddit ban? Are edits stored as revisions or overwritten? Ask for the dedup key. Ours is platform, object type, object id, revision.

• Rate limits and failure modes. What is the per-minute cap, what happens when you hit it, is there an SLA, and is there a support path with a human at the end of it.

• Jurisdiction and lawful basis. Where is the data hosted, under which law, on what basis is personal data processed, and what happens when a data subject objects. THINKPOL is EU-hosted and processes on Article 6(1)(f) legitimate interest, outside the reach of the US CLOUD Act.

• Silent decay. Duplicate rate, null-field creep and schema stability over the last quarter. Feeds rarely break loudly. They degrade, and the consumer notices months later.

What does a Reddit archive API cost?

THINKPOL's Historical Archive API starts at 0.15 EUR per query and falls to 0.03 EUR at platform volume, with the Live Firehose priced per keyword per month.

One query returns up to 50 results, including removed and deleted content, with no surcharge for the deleted material. Starter covers 0 to 100K queries a month at 0.15 EUR with a 2,000 EUR monthly minimum. Growth (100K to 500K) is 0.10 EUR, Professional (500K to 2M) is 0.07 EUR, Enterprise (2M to 10M) is 0.05 EUR, and Platform volume starts at 0.03 EUR. The Live Firehose runs from 5.00 EUR per keyword per month at Starter (up to 250 keywords) down to 0.40 EUR at Enterprise (up to 100,000 keywords). All prices exclude VAT.

None of that argues you should pay. If your work is retrospective and a four to six week lag is acceptable, Arctic Shift is free and well maintained, and you should use it. The case for a paid archive API is narrow and specific: you need content that Reddit no longer serves, you need it inside seconds rather than weeks, you need to state coverage and jurisdiction in a report, and you need someone to answer when a query fails.

If you are sizing this for real volume, we will map your query load onto the tiers and give you one number. Book a call.