Apify Reddit Scraper: Real Costs and 4 Costly Gotchas

We run Apify in production as one of our Reddit ingestion paths. What follows is what we learned paying for it, including four configuration rules that each cost us a failed run to discover. If you want the free route instead, we compared all three in Reddit scraping: what works and what breaks.

How much does an Apify Reddit scraper cost?

Two billing models exist on the Apify store and the difference matters far more than the headline rate.

For research, pay-per-event wins and it is not close. A rental actor at $20 a month costs $240 a year whether you scan once or a thousand times. On pay-per-event we spend cents per scan and nothing at all in a month where we do not run one. We deliberately rejected the rental sibling of the actor we use for exactly this reason: same data, wrong cost shape for our usage.

The concrete arithmetic on the actor we run: $0.02 to start a run, $0.002 per item stored. A 75-post run came back at $0.17 live. A 200-post scan is roughly $0.42. Apify's free plan gives $5 of credit a month with no card, which at that rate is a genuinely useful amount of Reddit research.

The four config mistakes that cost real money

This is the part worth the read. Each of these cost us a failed or wasted run to find, and a failed run still bills the start fee. Nothing here is in the actor documentation in a form that would have saved us.

1. Subreddit URLs must be plain strings

Pass an array of objects where the actor expects an array of strings and the run dies with `raw.trim is not a function`. It does not validate up front and reject cheaply. It starts, fails, and charges you the start fee for the privilege. This is the single easiest way to burn money on Apify without getting a single row back.

2. The post cap is global, not per subreddit

This one is genuinely counter-intuitive. `maxPostsCount` caps the whole run, not each subreddit in it. Pass five subreddits with a cap of 100 and you do not get 100 each, you get 100 shared out across them, and which ones get starved is not under your control.

The fix is one run per subreddit, started in parallel. That costs an extra start fee per subreddit, which sounds wasteful until you compare it against a run that returned depth for two communities and nothing usable for the other three. We bound the parallelism rather than firing everything at once.

3. Sort order in the URL is silently ignored

Put `/top` or `/hot` in the subreddit URL and the actor accepts it, runs happily, and returns `new` anyway. No error, no warning. Sort and time window are separate input fields, not URL paths.

Silent is the dangerous word. A run that errors gets fixed in ten minutes. A run that quietly returns the wrong sort order gets fixed after you have built conclusions on top of it. We verified this behaviour directly rather than trusting the URL.

4. Comment scraping usually is not worth it

Most Reddit scrapers can pull comments alongside posts, and it is tempting because comments feel like where the real detail lives. We tried it and retired it: it added roughly 30% to the spend for close to zero additional signal in our clustering. Post titles and bodies already carried the problem. Your mileage may differ, but measure it before you leave it switched on.

What Apify gives you that free RSS does not

One thing, mainly, and whether it matters depends entirely on what you are building. Engagement numbers. Reddit's public RSS feeds return post bodies, timestamps, titles and permalinks, but no score and no comment count. A listing-based Apify actor returns those fields, along with a lot more metadata per post.

If you are ranking posts by popularity, that gap is the whole ballgame and Apify is worth the cents. If you are clustering problems the way we do, it matters less than you would think: we rank on how many different people describe the same thing, how severe the language is, and how recent it is. A four-upvote post about a specific expensive problem beats a three-thousand-upvote joke, and score-based ranking gets that backwards.

The other real difference is pace. The free RSS route is rate limited to roughly 15 to 18 calls per ten-minute window, so a deep scan takes minutes of wall-clock. Apify runs typically finish in 20 to 50 seconds. You are buying speed and engagement fields, not access. What that output looks like once clustered is on any page in our research database, for example SaaS pain points.

Guardrails worth building before you scale it

Pay-per-event pricing is friendly right up until a loop misbehaves. Three things we would put in from day one rather than after the first surprising invoice.

• A cost fuse on every run. Apify's `maxItems` option is effectively a per-run spending cap, since cost is items times price. Set it deliberately on every call.
• A hard timeout on every run. Cost is capped by the item fuse regardless, but an open-ended run holds resources and hides failures.
• A monthly spend cap that fails closed. Ours reserves the estimated cost before a run starts, then reconciles against actual usage afterwards. If the counter is unreachable we skip Apify and fall back to the free path rather than risk an unbounded bill.

That last one is the important habit. Fail closed, not open. A degraded scan that used free RSS is a mild inconvenience. An unbounded bill on a runaway loop is a different kind of morning.

Should you use Apify for Reddit at all?

If you need engagement metrics, want results in under a minute, or would rather not build and maintain Reddit rate limit handling yourself, yes. It is cheap at research volume and the free credit covers a real amount of work.

If you are doing point-in-time market research and can live without upvote counts, the free RSS route does the job for nothing. We use both: Apify where speed and engagement data earn their cents, public feeds everywhere else. And if you want the finished research rather than the pipeline, IdeaFast runs all of this and hands back scored problems with the source thread attached to every one.

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