Protected reads and the public status exception
Protected reads use GET under https://api.redditapicloud.com with X-API-Key: <key> or Authorization: Bearer <key>. Both alternatives carry this domain's archive key, not a Reddit OAuth token. Keep the secret server-side. The account panel's Secure HttpOnly session cookie is separate from retrieval authentication. Your product's user sessions and permission checks remain your application's responsibility.
/v1/search searches posts and comments. /v1/posts constrains results to posts and /v1/comments to comments. All three accept q, subreddit, author, kind, from, to, min_score, limit and page, not id. kind accepts post or comment; omit it to allow both through search. q is text search, without arbitrary query DSL, sentiment classification or server-side custom analytics.
/v1/item?id=... requires id only and looks for one archived record, which may be absent. It does not walk parents or replies. /v1/subreddits accepts prefix and limit only for community-name discovery, without page traversal or guaranteed globally exact counts. /v1/status is public and uncharged: its static scope disclosure confirms that the HTTP application responds, without checking search availability, record freshness, key validity or balance.
Date filters and records your feature can display
from and to accept YYYY-MM-DD in UTC and filter created_utc, not when a record entered the archive. The complete final to day is included. These are day filters, not intraday cursor values. If you divide work by date, record the actual bounds and distinguish your job's processing time from source creation time. Such partitioning does not prove exhaustive retrieval or a schedule of archive updates.
min_score sets a numeric score threshold without sorting or assessing advice quality. Retrieval follows internal _doc order, not chronology, relevance or score. Reordering received records locally is an application decision and does not establish full coverage or stable results. Keep source fields separate from labels or scores calculated by your own research feature.
Responses return flat records rather than pre-assembled thread trees. When parent_id or link_id fields exist in the data, your client can optionally group them locally to reconstruct conversations, but the server does not guarantee complete ancestry or a full thread hierarchy. Responses contain data, pagination and credits. Individual fields may be missing or vary. Your application must validate what arrived rather than assuming a fixed schema or complete context.
Page boundaries, totals and failure handling
Content routes accept limit and page from 1 to 100, one page per request. A series of calls does not guarantee 10000 distinct records or a complete dataset. There is no page=101 for the same query. A product action can trigger several paid calls if your application adds paging or lookups. Bound those calls yourself; the archive does not supply your SaaS customer roles or spending policy.
Read pagination.total with relation: eq means an exact query total, gte a lower bound and unknown no reliable total, possibly null. An empty page after page one can return unknown rather than a count of zero. An exact total does not prove that all matches were downloaded or that the archive contains all history. Preserve returned has_more and window_exhausted as boundary signals, not unlimited-export tokens.
HTTP 400 concerns invalid parameters, 401 a missing or invalid key, 402 insufficient credits and 429 a frequency limit. Invalid requests do not debit; upstream failures refund reservations. Every successful retrieval costs one credit, even empty or repeated. Response loss may conceal a billed success, and a local processing failure does not refund it. Save the received response before advancing local progress and budget successful retries separately.
