TL;DR: I got a 28 day ban from r/SaaS, then a permanent one from r/startups, both for replies I thought were helpful. The rules were posted the whole time, I just hadn't read them. Radar is the tool I built the day after the second ban: it reads a subreddit's real rules before I post, paces my pitches, and never posts anything I haven't read myself.
Hi, I'm Roberto. I build small products and I try to talk about them where the people who need them already are. On Reddit that turned out to be a good way to get banned.
The bans
The first one was from r/SaaS, 28 days. I had replied to a thread with something I thought was useful and mentioned what I'd built. Looking at it later, the subreddit's own policy is that promotion is allowed only if it's relevant and helpful, with feedback requests confined to a weekly thread. My reply wasn't in that thread. I didn't check.
The second one was worse. On 4 September 2026, r/startups banned me permanently. Same pattern: a reply I stood behind, in a subreddit whose rule 2 prohibits direct sales, advertisements, or promotional posts of any kind, and confines promotion to designated threads. That rule was there before I ever posted. I just hadn't read it.
Neither reply was spam in the way I think of spam. I wasn't dropping a link and running. I was answering a real question from someone with a real problem, and the product I mentioned solved it. That didn't matter. The subreddit had a place for that kind of post, and it wasn't the comment section of someone else's thread.
What I noticed
Once I stopped being annoyed about it, I went and read the rules on a few dozen subreddits I post in. They're public. Anyone can read them. Most of them aren't even hostile to founders, they just want promotion routed to a specific place: a weekly thread, a flair, a mod approval step, a 1-in-10 ratio of posts about yourself versus everything else. My mistake was posting in the wrong place, at the wrong pace.
The tools built to help you post more on Reddit mostly make this worse. A lot of them sell by the reply, a fixed pack you're meant to burn through. A 500 replies pack pushes you to empty every vaguely related thread, and Reddit notices that pattern quickly. The incentive is backwards. You pay to use up a number, and using up a number in the wrong subreddit is exactly what got me banned twice.
What I wanted was something that told me what a subreddit allows before I typed anything, and that didn't want me pitching more than the place could stand.
What I built
I started the repository for Radar on 5 September 2026, the day after the r/startups ban. You give it your site, it reads the page and figures out what you've built, then it looks for the subreddits where that's relevant.
For every one of those subreddits, it reads the real posted rules, or the sidebar description when there aren't any, and gives the community a label: promote, soft, or hang out. Promote means members are asking for tools like yours and the rules allow it. Soft means the product can come up once, disclosed, inside an answer that helps first. Hang out means you show up and you're useful, but you never name the product at all. Every thread card in the inbox shows the rules behind that label, so I see the reasoning behind each one.
It also paces me. One pitch per subreddit, then a cooldown, so I can't repeat the pattern that got me banned. And before I see a drafted reply, a check runs against it: disclosure has to be present where the rules ask for it, the product can only come up in the final third of the reply after the actual help, and any claim about the product has to match what's on my own site. Nothing gets invented. If a draft fails that check, it's rewritten before I ever read it.
None of that posts by itself. Radar drafts, I read, I paste it under my own name. After two bans for things I stood behind but hadn't checked, this is the point. You can read more about how a subreddit's own rules decide whether Radar will even suggest a pitch, and about how it decides a thread is worth replying to in the first place.
How I use it myself
I run Radar on my own products. On ColorHer, which restores old photos, and on SHIP FM, a radio station for startups, and on Radar itself. Every reply it finds and drafts, I read, edit if it needs it, and paste in my own browser under u/robsanna. I don't pass that part off to anything.
The three proof shots on the landing page show the range of what that looks like. One is a ColorHer reply that's help only, a restoration tip with no pitch at all, and the original poster replied to say thanks. One is a SHIP FM reply where I disclosed upfront that I built it, and the poster went and tried it. One is a Radar reply, help first, where the subreddit's own rules meant the link couldn't go in the comment at all, so it went by DM instead. That last one is the pattern I built the whole tool around: the help stays public, the pitch goes wherever the rules say it can go, sometimes nowhere.
I read every reply before it goes out.
What it costs
Radar is $29 a month or $290 a year, one price, every product on your account included, no reply quotas to burn through. The first 50 founding seats are $399 one time. After those sell out, new monthly seats are $39. I priced it flat on purpose: a tool that charges by the reply is a tool with a reason to want you posting more than the room can stand, and that's exactly the incentive that got me banned. Full details are on /pricing.
If you want to see what it finds for your own site before deciding anything, Scan my site free.
FAQ
Is this astroturfing?
No. Disclosure is mechanical, not optional: a reply that names the product has to say I built it, and a draft that tries to pose as an unaffiliated user gets rejected and rewritten before I see it. The whole reason I built this after two bans was to stop posting things that read as fake helpful, not to get better at it.
Will using Radar guarantee I don't get banned?
No tool can promise that, and I wouldn't trust one that did. What Radar does is remove the two mistakes that got me banned: posting in a place the rules didn't allow, and pitching more often than the subreddit could stand. Every card shows the real rules, the draft is checked against them, and nothing posts without me reading it first.
Does replying on Reddit actually bring in customers?
For me, yes, in ways I can point to rather than round off. People answer. Someone checked out the FM after a reply. A first customer showed up through this. I'm not going to invent a bigger number than that, because I don't have one yet, and made up stats would defeat the point of a tool built on reading things carefully.
Do you still read every reply yourself?
Every single one. Radar finds the thread and drafts the reply, I read it, edit it if it needs it, and paste it under my own Reddit username. Nothing in this tool posts on its own, logs into Reddit, or touches an account that isn't mine, so nothing goes out that I haven't personally read.