The Real Cost of Apify's Reddit Scraper

Comments are the whole reason most people want Reddit data in the first place — and they're exactly where a per-result price tag stops behaving simply. We didn't want to just do the math, so we ran the actual test: the same real post, through both APIs, timed and priced side by side.

The real test

We picked one live thread — a r/SaaS post with 103 comments showing on Reddit — and pulled it through Apify's Reddit Scraper Lite (the most popular Reddit tool on Apify's store) and through ThreadSnoop's comment-tree endpoint, back to back.

Same thread, roughly 267x the cost and 20x+ the wait on Apify — and ThreadSnoop's comment-tree endpoint returned the fuller thread: 107 comments, against the ~103 showing on Reddit at the time (small drift between two separate checks of an active thread is normal — comments keep arriving).

The 23 seconds matters as much as the price, maybe more. That's Apify starting a scraper run, waiting for it to finish, and handing back results — for a single post. An AI agent checking Reddit as one step in a bigger task doesn't have 23 seconds to spend on it; ThreadSnoop answered the same request in under a second, the same shape as any other API call an agent makes without a second thought.

What “pay per result” really means

Most Reddit scrapers on Apify's store — including Reddit Scraper Lite — bill using Apify's standard pay-per-result event, which charges for every item written to the output, not for how long the scraper runs or a flat subscription fee. A post is one item. A comment is also one item — the same as the post it's replying to. That's why our 103-comment test thread billed for 90 separate items, not one.

That's reasonable if all you want is post titles. It stops being reasonable the moment you want the comments — which, on Reddit, is usually where the actual signal is.

What it costs at 500 comments, and beyond

Our test thread had about 100 comments — an ordinary, moderately active post. The gap only grows with the thread:

What that does to a real monitoring workload

One post is a rounding error either way. The gap compounds once you're checking Reddit regularly — which is the actual use case for an AI agent or any kind of ongoing monitoring. Here's an illustrative month, not a live test this time: watching 20 subreddits daily, seeing about 20 new posts per subreddit per day with an average of 30 comments each.

Same subreddits, same posts, same comments — roughly 67–100x the monthly cost on Apify, purely because of how comments get billed. Nothing about this scenario is cherry-picked to be extreme: 30 comments on a post is unremarkable, and 20 posts a day across 20 subreddits is a modest monitoring footprint, not a firehose.

Why the difference exists

It comes down to what each side is charging for. Apify's default pricing event charges per item added to a scraper's output — a deliberate, sensible default for a general-purpose scraping platform that has no idea in advance whether your job returns 10 items or 10,000. ThreadSnoop's comment-tree endpoint is built for exactly one job — return everything under a post — so it can afford to charge per call instead of per item, with a fixed cap (500 comments) instead of open-ended metering. General-purpose pricing and purpose-built pricing solve different problems, and this is the place their difference shows up most.

Bottom line

If comments are more than an afterthought in what you're pulling from Reddit, pay-per-result pricing is worth running the actual numbers on before committing — the sticker price per 1,000 results doesn't tell you what a real comment thread costs. New ThreadSnoop accounts get 1,000 free Reddit searches, no card required, so you can pull a few real comment trees and see the difference yourself: get a free API key. For the fuller comparison beyond just cost — call shape, reliability, AI agent fit — see the full Apify Reddit Scraper comparison.

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