Write the acceptance sentence first
A teammate can open a research view, request archived SideProject examples about feedback, and save a note about what to investigate next. That is a useful acceptance sentence because it describes observable product behavior. It does not promise representative market research, current opinions or an automatically generated product roadmap.
This service provides an independent historical Reddit archive accessible via a REST API, distinct from official Reddit services. It does not operate as a live stream nor does it hold any formal endorsement from Reddit, Inc. The data is pre-indexed and stored, allowing teams to search historical posts and comments without maintaining their own Elasticsearch cluster infrastructure.
Keep a user action between the browser and the archive
Authorize the teammate in your own backend before issuing the retrieval. The archive account authenticates your server, not each customer of your SaaS. Retrieve the saved domain-specific key from server configuration and use either Authorization: Bearer <key> or X-API-Key: <key>. Do not send it to the browser alongside the records.
Decide whether opening a saved note should display the response you retained or trigger another paid search. Implementing a local saved view is your application work; the hosted archive does not provide workspace permissions, storage for those notes or a dedicated cluster for your product.
Test the exact question with three records
Use https://api.redditapicloud.com/v1/search?q=feedback&subreddit=SideProject&limit=3. The homepage explains the parameters and shows a synthetic empty response. Search may return posts and comments when kind is omitted. q searches title and text; multiple terms use AND within a matching field. It is not a phrase, semantic-similarity or sentiment interface.
For a date-bounded feature, from and to use YYYY-MM-DD in UTC on created_utc and include the full final day. They do not describe ingestion time. min_score filters a numeric threshold without sorting or assessing advice quality. Internal _doc order is not chronology, relevance or score. Your local sort only reorders what arrived and cannot recover absent records.
Separate source material from a teammate's conclusion
Validate data before reading optional title and text fields, render them as text and retain the query alongside the received material if your feature saves it. Flat records can be grouped locally when parent_id or link_id is present; gaps remain gaps, without a promise of complete conversations. A label such as a product theme is your team's interpretation, not a classification supplied by the archive.
Give an empty result its own display and preserve the distinction from a failed request. If the teammate changes the question, record the new query instead of silently merging samples into one supposedly representative result. Repeated retrieval need not return identical records.
Put a ceiling on the action, including retries
Content limit and page range from 1 to 100, with one page per request. One click in your product can cause several separately charged requests if you build automatic paging or context lookups. Define your own maximum calls and delayed retry policy. These are controls you implement, not per-customer quotas supplied by the archive. Smaller date windows do not establish complete coverage or unique records.
Read total with relation: eq means an exact query total, gte a lower bound and unknown an unreliable or null total. An empty deeper page can have unknown rather than zero. Preserve has_more and window_exhausted and stop at supported page boundaries. Neither an exact total nor an exhausted local job proves that every matching historical record has been retrieved.
Every successful request, including an empty page, costs one credit at $1 per 1000. If the client loses a response after server success, the credit may still be spent; a successful retry spends another. Invalid requests do not debit and upstream failures refund the reservation. Reprocessing a saved response locally avoids another retrieval, but does not undo the original charge.
Release after behavior checks, not a green status alone
Try an authorized and an unauthorized user, an empty result, missing fields and an interrupted response. Check 400 for parameters, 401 for the key, 402 for balance and 429 for rate limits; use bounded delays where a retry is appropriate. Public /v1/status reports static scope and application responsiveness, not upstream search health.
Review whether the pilot genuinely helps the planning discussion before exposing it more widely. Keep your own server, retention decisions and customer permissions in the release plan. Use the key page for credentials and the pricing page for a $50 minimum top-up; neither account creation nor payment establishes that this research feature is ready.
