A Subreddit Stats Alternative That Still Gets Fresh Data

Subredditstats.com was the reference tool for subreddit data for years, and to be clear: it is still online, and its historical graphs still load. What changed is the data behind them. In April 2023 Reddit announced paid API access, effective July 1, 2023. The site's maintainer, who runs it as an unpaid hobby project, wrote on the site that the new pricing would cost him "a couple thousand dollars per month" and warned the site "may break or stop updating soon."

That warning is still up in 2026, along with a stronger one: the site now tells visitors its data is "likely out of date or inaccurate" and asks people not to rely on it "for anything serious/important". Users noticed the cracks early. Threads from late 2023 flagged post and comment counts that dropped roughly tenfold overnight, which turned out to be a collection artifact rather than a real change, and smaller communities have reported not appearing in its search at all.

None of that is a knock on the maintainer. Reddit's pricing killed most free data collectors that year, including paid ones: GummySearch, a $29/month audience research tool, shut down entirely on November 30, 2025. Subreddit Stats survives as a genuinely useful historical archive. It just can't tell you what's growing now.

In September 2025, Reddit removed the subscriber total from community pages and replaced it with two 7-day activity metrics, "Visitors" and "Contributions". The counts still exist in Reddit's API, but you can no longer glance at a subreddit and see how big it is, let alone whether it's growing.

That change is why a tracker with its own history matters more than it used to. FreeSubStats pulls subscriber counts daily through the official API and keeps the time series, so you can chart growth per day, week, or month across every tracked community, and sort any of the 125 topics by which communities are gaining fastest. If a subreddit you care about isn't tracked yet, you can submit it and it enters the daily scan queue.

Use Subreddit Stats for history. Its pre-2023 archives, commenter overlaps, and network graphs are still the richest free record of how Reddit communities related to each other before the API change.

Use FreeSubStats for anything happening now: spotting rising communities, checking whether a niche is growing before you invest in it, or watching subscriber trends across a custom list of subreddits.

If your question is "when should I post?", a scheduling tool like Subreddit Traffic Tracker fits better; its paid tiers run $9 to $49 per month depending on how many custom subreddits you monitor. And if you were considering GummySearch for audience research, it closed to new users in November 2025. We keep a separate GummySearch alternative page for that.