How to Recover Your Reddit Post History After the API Shutdown (2026)

You went looking for something you wrote years ago - a thread that helped people, a post you wanted to quote, a record of a community you built - and it was gone. Or the app you read Reddit through simply stopped working one day in 2023 and took your easy access with it. If that is why you are here, the good news is that your public posts almost certainly still exist. You just lost the door you used to reach them.

Why this happened

In 2023 Reddit started charging for its data API - about $0.24 per 1,000 calls. For the third-party apps that millions of people actually used to read and manage Reddit, that pricing was fatal. Apollo, Reddit is Fun (RIF), and Sync all shut down within months. Programmatic access did not disappear, but it became expensive and rate-limited enough that the casual, personal use of it - including pulling your own history - quietly died.

The part most people miss

Reddit still publishes free, public RSS and Atom feeds. They sit behind the same content the API gates, but they were never switched off. For most user and subreddit URLs you can add .rss to the end and get a structured feed of recent public activity. That feed is the side door. It does not need your password, it does not touch the paid API, and it works whether or not you can log in.

The honest version

This is genuinely doable yourself, and we will show you how below. The reason a paid service exists is not that the feed is secret - it is that turning a thin, recent, duplicate-riddled feed into a complete, clean, readable archive is fiddly work. If you have the time and patience, the DIY path is real.

The do-it-yourself path

01Find your feed URL. For a user it is typically reddit.com/user/USERNAME/submitted.rss for posts and /user/USERNAME/comments.rss for comments.
02Open it in a browser or an RSS reader. You will see your most recent public items as structured entries with titles, links, and timestamps.
03Save the raw feed. Copy the XML, or use a reader that lets you export, so you have the source rather than a screenshot.
04Parse the entries into something readable - pull out each title, permalink, date, and the body HTML, and convert that HTML into clean paragraphs.
05De-duplicate. Crossposts and re-shares show up as separate entries with near-identical titles; collapse them so your archive is not cluttered.

Where do-it-yourself breaks down

The feed is a starting point, not a finished archive. A few honest limits to expect:

Feeds are shallow. RSS returns recent items, not your entire decade of history. Reconstructing the full record takes more than one fetch.
Crossposts duplicate. The same post can appear several times; merging them by hand is tedious.
Removed posts need flagging. Some entries are title-only because the body was removed - you want those separated from intact posts, not silently dropped.
HTML needs cleaning. Raw selftext is full of markup; getting it into paragraphs you can paste into a doc or newsletter is the slow part.

None of this is impossible. It is an afternoon or two of careful work if you only have a modest history, and considerably more if you were prolific. That trade - your time versus a finished file - is the whole decision.

If you would rather skip the tedious part

That is exactly what the Account Archive is for. We rebuild your full public post history from the open feed, merge the crossposts, separate removed posts from intact ones, clean the formatting into real paragraphs, and deliver it as a paste-ready DOCX and PDF - every permalink kept, oldest to newest. No password, no paid API, done in 18 hours.