Subreddit stats: how to size up a community before you post

Subreddit stats are the numbers that tell you whether a community is worth posting in: how big it is, how active it is right now, what its rules allow, who moderates it and what kind of post does well there. Everyone checks subscriber count first, and it tells you the least. Before you post, check five things: size, recent activity, rules, the mod team and the top posts of the past week.

This guide shows how to get each one by hand and through an API. It includes real responses from r/SaaS and a script that measures activity for any subreddit.

Which subreddit stats matter

In 2025 Reddit changed which numbers it shows. Its announcement (Sept 9, 2025, checked Oct 14, 2026) replaced the member count with Visitors, "how many different users visited a subreddit in the past seven days," and Contributions, "the total number of non-removed posts and comments made in a community in the past seven days." Reddit's reason: "subscribers, which were often a measure of a subreddit’s age and not current activity."

Every subreddit's page shows both figures, which makes them a good first look. They don't tell you what the community allows or rewards, so you still need the rest of the table.

Get subreddit stats in one call

GET /v1/reddit/subreddits/{name} returns size, description, rules, moderators and posting settings in one response for 2 credits:

curl "https://api.chatterapi.com/v1/reddit/subreddits/SaaS" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHATTERAPI_KEY"

{
  "data": {
    "name": "SaaS",
    "title": "Software as a Service",
    "subscribers": 820451,
    "createdAt": "2008-07-31T21:06:38.000Z",
    "nsfw": false,
    "rules": [
      { "title": "No Vendor Spam on posts or comments" },
      { "title": "No Low-Effort / Low-Quality Content" },
      { "title": "No selling, soliciting, or fundraising" },
      { "title": "AMA / Surveys / Polls require approval" },
      { "title": "No Promotional or Advertising SaaS" }
    ],
    "moderators": [
      { "name": "Dubinko", "since": "2026-04-13T18:27:26.000Z" },
      { "name": "bot-bouncer", "since": "2026-04-06T17:50:57.000Z" },
      { "name": "evasion-guard", "since": "2026-04-16T11:00:20.000Z" },
      { "name": "scanslop", "since": "2026-04-17T21:44:59.000Z" },
      { "name": "AutoModerator", "since": "2026-04-24T08:36:04.000Z" }
    ],
    "posting": { "submissionType": "any", "restrictPosting": true, "allowPolls": false }
  },
  "credits": { "charged": 0, "remaining": 719 }
}

That response came from a test key, which returns one recorded real response per endpoint at no charge. It has been trimmed: the full version lists 11 rules and 9 moderators, and each rule carries its full description. If you'd rather see the same data in a browser, use the free subreddit stats tool.

Watch one field. When rules comes back null, the data came from a fallback source that can't see rules, so it doesn't mean the subreddit has none.

Measure activity, not subscribers

820,451 subscribers tells you r/SaaS is big. It doesn't tell you whether anyone will read a post made today. For that, count recent posts and replies.

GET /v1/reddit/subreddits/{name}/posts with sort=new returns the newest posts first. Page back until you pass seven days, then count:

• Posts per day: total posts in the window divided by 7.
• Median comments per post. Use the median rather than the average, because one viral thread skews an average.
• The share of posts with zero comments. A high share means posts get buried, or that many of them are spam nobody engages with.

Each page costs 2 credits, and a busy subreddit can take several pages to cover a week. The script further down does this for you.

Subreddit traffic stats you can't get

The full traffic page is part of Mod Insights, a moderator tool (checked Oct 14, 2026). If you don't moderate the sub you won't see it, either through Reddit or through any API that reads public data. Third-party sites that show "traffic" estimate it from public signals like subscriber growth and post counts. That works for comparing communities, as long as you read the number as an estimate.

Read the rules and the mod team

The rules decide whether you can post at all, and they're more specific than most people expect. r/SaaS's vendor-spam rule, shown in full in the API response, allows promotion only occasionally: "Max 1 mention or 3 links can be shared every 60 days," with affiliation disclosed. Its low-effort rule bans "AI-generated text (even if you "made all the effort" to copy-paste it yourself)." Surveys need mod approval first.

The moderator list tells you how the sub is run. In this sample, r/SaaS has 9 moderators. Four are people. The other five are bots or tools: AutoModerator plus apps named bot-bouncer, evasion-guard, scanslop and modmail-userinfo. With that much automation filtering posts, new accounts and anything that reads as generated text should expect to be caught before a human sees it.

posting.restrictPosting: true and allowPolls: false matter too. If a sub doesn't allow the format you planned, change the plan before you write the post.

See what top posts reward

The past week's top feed is the clearest signal of what a community upvotes. Use sort=top&time=week:

curl "https://api.chatterapi.com/v1/reddit/subreddits/SaaS/posts?sort=top&time=week" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHATTERAPI_KEY"

{
  "data": [
    { "title": "I made $7,802 today", "score": 614, "numComments": 276,
      "upvoteRatio": 0.946, "createdAt": "2026-10-02T03:29:02.000Z" },
    { "title": "Too good to be true? 13k installs, 4.7 stars, ~€22k revenue. All in I'm still in the minus",
      "score": 340, "numComments": 128, "upvoteRatio": 0.962 },
    { "title": "Shutting Down my SaaS After a Year", "score": 239, "numComments": 104 }
  ],
  "page": { "nextCursor": "AdxXcaGWSY8c…", "hasMore": true }
}

In this sample of 25 posts from early October 2026, 14 titles are founder milestone or failure stories: a first customer, a revenue number, a shutdown. The median post had 78 points and 43 comments. Put that next to the rules and the pattern is clear: r/SaaS rewards first-person numbers and punishes anything that reads as a pitch. If you're a founder, a post about what happened to your revenue will do better there than a post about your product.

Three posts in the same sample scored 0 with no comments. Filter zero-engagement posts out before you compute medians, or they'll drag the numbers down.

The free subreddit posts tool shows hot, new, top and rising feeds without code.

A subreddit stats script

This Python script prints a one-screen profile of any subreddit: its size, how many rules and moderators it has, posts per day, and median comments per post over the last seven days.

import os, statistics, requests
from datetime import datetime, timedelta, timezone

KEY = os.environ["CHATTERAPI_KEY"]
BASE = "https://api.chatterapi.com/v1/reddit/subreddits"
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {KEY}"}

def profile(name, days=7, max_pages=8):
    sub = requests.get(f"{BASE}/{name}", headers=H, timeout=30).json()["data"]
    cutoff = datetime.now(timezone.utc) - timedelta(days=days)
    posts, cursor = [], None
    for _ in range(max_pages):
        params = {"sort": "new", "limit": 100, **({"cursor": cursor} if cursor else {})}
        body = requests.get(f"{BASE}/{name}/posts", headers=H, params=params, timeout=30).json()
        page = [p for p in body["data"]
                if datetime.fromisoformat(p["createdAt"].replace("Z", "+00:00")) >= cutoff]
        posts += page
        if len(page) < len(body["data"]) or not body["page"]["hasMore"]:
            break
        cursor = body["page"]["nextCursor"]
    comments = [p["numComments"] for p in posts] or [0]
    return {
        "subscribers": sub["subscribers"],
        "rules": len(sub["rules"] or []),
        "moderators": len(sub["moderators"] or []),
        "posts_per_day": round(len(posts) / days, 1),
        "median_comments": statistics.median(comments),
        "zero_comment_share": round(sum(c == 0 for c in comments) / len(comments), 2),
    }

print(profile("SaaS"))

Profiling a full week of a busy subreddit costs 2 credits for the profile plus 2 for each page of posts. Run it on three or four candidate communities and compare their activity numbers instead of their subscriber counts.

Other subreddit stats tools

You don't need code for a one-off check. The main options compare like this (checked Oct 14, 2026):

• Reddit itself shows visitors and contributions on every subreddit page. It's free and first-party, but there's no rules export, no history and no comparison view.
• subredditstats.com is a hobby project that ranks subreddits by growth, subscribers, comments per day and posts per day, with per-subreddit charts and subreddit overlap tools. The historical charts help when you want to know whether a sub is growing. Its own homepage warns that its numbers "should only be used as a general guide."
• GummySearch used to be the common recommendation for audience research, but its homepage says it "is closed as of 11/30/2025."
• ChatterAPI gives you a current snapshot (size, rules, moderators, posting settings and feeds) as JSON, for scripts and agents. It doesn't keep historical subscriber charts, so pair it with a history site when growth over time matters.

Size up a subreddit now

Paste a subreddit into the free subreddit stats tool to see its size, rules, moderators and posting settings. If you haven't picked a community yet, start with how to find subreddits for any topic. For research, our guide to finding pain points on Reddit uses the same calls, and the Reddit API guide covers every endpoint.

ChatterAPI gives your code and your agents Reddit and X data through one key, over REST or MCP. You don't need to apply for a developer account. Sign up with Google for 100 free credits without entering a card. Plans start at $19/month for 25,000 credits.