PullPush: what it covers, and where it stops.

PullPush.io is a community-run reimplementation of the Pushshift API. It exposes endpoints for submissions and comments with the same style of query parameters as the interface a decade of Reddit research was written against, plus a browser frontend at search.pullpush.io for people who do not want to write code. If you have old scripts sitting in a repository, porting them to PullPush is usually a base-URL change rather than a rewrite.

That compatibility is the whole point, and it is why PullPush became the default answer when a research pipeline broke. It is also the source of most misunderstandings about it. PullPush inherited the shape of the API. It did not inherit the ingestion pipeline behind it, and those are two very different things once you start relying on the results.

PullPush runs on community resources rather than commercial infrastructure. There is no uptime commitment, no support contract and no capacity headroom, so outages happen and they are not announced in advance. "Is PullPush down" is a recurring search for that reason, and when the answer is yes, there is nothing to do but wait.

The rate limit is roughly 30 requests per minute. For a spot check that is invisible. For anything at scale it is the binding constraint on your work. Enumerating an account with thousands of comments, sweeping a subreddit across a year, or backfilling a dataset all become jobs measured in hours rather than minutes, and every one of those hours is exposed to an outage that restarts the job. Plan for retries, checkpoint your progress, and do not build anything time-sensitive on top of it.

None of this is a criticism of the people running it. A free service handling that kind of load is doing more than anyone is paying it to do. It is simply the operating envelope you are working inside, and it should be stated before you design around it rather than discovered mid-investigation.

Reddit restricted third-party data access in 2023. The archive PullPush reimplements lost the privileged ingestion that made it complete, and its public API was withdrawn. PullPush rebuilt the interface, but the upstream firehose that fed the original no longer exists in the same form, so coverage after 2023 is partial rather than exhaustive.

Partial is the important word. It does not mean the recent years are empty, and it does not mean they are reliable. It means a query can return results and still be missing items that existed, with no signal in the response telling you which case you are in. For casual lookups that is tolerable. For anything you have to defend later, an unquantified gap is the problem, not the size of it.

PullPush is genuinely good at a specific set of jobs, and paying for something else to do them would be waste. Use it for one-off lookups where you can eyeball the result. Use it for exploratory research where you are trying to find out whether a question is worth asking at all. Use it for historical windows before 2023, where inherited coverage is at its strongest. Use it when your existing code speaks that API and rewriting it would cost more than the occasional gap.

It is also the right tool when the cost of being wrong is low. A hobby project, a curiosity about an old thread, a rough count of how often a term appeared in a subreddit: none of these need guaranteed recall, and PullPush answers them for free without an account.

The line is not free versus paid. It is whether a silent gap in the result set changes what you conclude. If it does not, PullPush is the correct choice.

For bulk research, Arctic Shift is the maintained dump project: roughly 2.5 billion items through February 2026, around 261 GB of Parquet on Hugging Face, monthly updates with a four to six week lag, and a free API alongside the files. You get a fixed corpus you can process offline and cite, at the price of storage, batch processing and that lag. It answers questions about last year well and questions about this morning not at all.

For removed threads, Reveddit is alive and free, but the distinction it depends on matters. "[removed]" means a moderator acted, and traces persist in Reddit's live API, which is how Reveddit reconstructs them. "[deleted]" means the author acted, and Reddit overwrites the body everywhere including its own API, so only a copy captured before the deletion can return it. Reveddit is built on the live API, so author-deleted content is unrecoverable through it. The same logic applies to the tools covered on the Removeddit alternative page.

THINKPOL is the option when the gap itself is unacceptable. It is an independent archive rather than a rebuild of anything: 30 billion posts and comments back to 2005, retaining content deleted by authors and removed by moderators, with full-text search returning in under 300 milliseconds through the archive API, also exposed over MCP for agent tooling. It is commercial and metered, which is the honest trade against PullPush being free. You can test the corpus without an account through archive search and user lookup. For how these projects relate to each other historically, see the other Pushshift successors compared.

The most common mistake made with PullPush is not a technical one. It is reporting an empty response as a finding. "PullPush returned nothing" and "this was never posted" are different statements, and only the first one is supported by the evidence in front of you.

A query can come back empty because the content never existed, because it falls in the post-2023 coverage gap, because the rate limiter truncated your sweep, or because the service was degraded when you ran it. The response looks identical in all four cases. If a negative result carries weight in your work, confirm it against a source with known coverage before you write it down, and record which source you used.