The options
Devvit. Reddit's platform for apps that run inside Reddit, in TypeScript, installed by moderators after review. Complete for apps that live on Reddit. Not an option for reading Reddit from outside it, which is what an alternative to the API usually means.
A commercial agreement with Reddit. Reddit sells data access to large companies on negotiated terms. Pricing is quote based and not published. For a team of one to fifty people building a tool, it is rarely a conversation that starts.
Scraping the HTML. Fragile, against Reddit's terms, blocked aggressively, and a maintenance job that never ends. Also slow for comments, which are loaded in pieces. Most teams that try it stop within a year.
Archives. Bulk dumps are useful for history and useless for anything current, and Pushshift's live search is limited to moderators. Good for a study of 2019, no help for an alert today.
Redlisten. A separate service that serves Reddit's read paths with the same JSON, plus RSS, PRAW support and native feeds, search and streams. Read access, public content, a key instead of OAuth. The rest of this page is about this option.
What the same code gets
# A Reddit API call, before and after. Same path, same JSON.
curl "https://oauth.reddit.com/r/startups/new?limit=25" -H "Authorization: Bearer <reddit oauth token>"
curl "https://api.redlisten.com/r/startups/new?limit=25" -H "Authorization: Bearer rl_live_YOUR_KEY"Listings for any community or combination, every public comment in a community, full threads by id with the comment tree, user history, lookups through /api/info and /by_id, search, and /r/{sub}/about. All with or without .json, paged with limit and after, with x-ratelimit-* headers on every response. PRAW works by setting reddit_url and oauth_url; snoowrap by setting endpointDomain; raw fetch or requests by changing the host and adding a header.
What is added
Three things Reddit's API did not offer. Sitewide cursor feeds, /v1/posts and /v1/comments, that deliver every public post and comment in order and let a collector resume from a saved cursor. Full text search over the last 30 days that includes comments, with AND, OR, NOT, quotes, subreddit: and author:. And keyword streams: saved searches that keep matching, with a webhook, Slack or Discord message or email digest per match, and counts by day for reporting. Removed and deleted items keep their captured text on the native endpoints, with a status flag.
What is left out
Writing. There is no posting, voting, replying, messaging or moderation; those stay on Reddit through a registered app or Devvit. No logged in view, so private communities, inboxes and saved items are not served. Paid plans search and list the last 30 days; older history is an Enterprise conversation. Redlisten is not affiliated with Reddit, Inc.
Effort and cost
Effort is a config change for most reading code: two settings in PRAW, one in snoowrap, a hostname and a header for raw calls, a URL edit for a feed. Most people are done in an afternoon and test with the free key, which has 250 requests a month. Plans as listed on 6 Nov 2026: Pro at $29 a month with 50,000 requests and search over 30 days, Team at $99 with 250,000 requests and 1,000 items a page on the native feeds, Business at $299 with 1,000,000 requests, exports and a live streaming connection. Yearly billing takes two months off. No daily caps.
Choosing
If the app runs inside Reddit, build on Devvit. If the company is large enough to negotiate, talk to Reddit. If the work is historical, use an archive. If the app reads Reddit and does something elsewhere, which is the common case, Redlisten keeps the code and the language and removes the deadline. The API replacement page maps each endpoint and the shutdown page lays out the dates. For the price question on Reddit's own side, see Reddit API pricing.