Paste a subreddit name above and the checker returns one of four promo verdicts: allowed, restricted, banned, or unknown. Each verdict comes straight from the subreddit's own posted rules, or its sidebar description when it has no rules, read by the same audit process Radar runs on every community it scans for a founder. The tool quotes the rule, not tone or vibe.
How to use it
- Type the subreddit name into the box above the fold, with or without the r/.
- Read the verdict and the one-line reason under it. That line cites the actual rule, not a summary written to sound reassuring.
- Check whether the subreddit sets a karma or account-age gate, and read the plain guidance line under the verdict (it tells you what to do).
- Open "see all rules" if you want the rest of the subreddit's rulebook, not just the ones about promotion.
What to do with each verdict:
- Allowed: you can mention your product in a reply, as long as you say you built it.
- Restricted: you can mention it, but only inside the specific condition the rule sets (a thread, a ratio, a flair, mod permission).
- Banned: don't name your product in a normal post or comment. Reply to help, and stop there.
- Unknown: the audit has no rule and no sidebar to go on. Treat it like banned until you've read the community yourself, because missing evidence is not permission.
If you already have a reply drafted, the reply checker runs it against the same verdict and flags what would get it removed. If you haven't picked subreddits yet, the list of 35 launch venues is a faster starting point than checking communities one at a time.
What the four verdicts mean
The checker classifies every subreddit's stance on self-promotion into one of four buckets.
Allowed
The rules do not prohibit a founder from mentioning their own product. A compliant reply answers the poster's question first, then says plainly that you built the thing you're mentioning, in the same sentence as the mention. No hiding behind "I found this tool" when you made it.
Restricted
The rules allow self-promotion, but only under a stated condition: a designated thread or day, a participation ratio (commonly a 10% rule), a flair requirement, or mod approval first. A compliant reply follows the condition exactly. If the rule says the product flair is required and you don't have it, the reply doesn't happen there, not even with disclosure.
Banned
The rules prohibit promotion outright, or confine it to a single designated thread that isn't the one you're replying in. A compliant reply never names the product. It answers the question, offers real help, and leaves it at that. If someone asks what you use, that's a different situation than volunteering it.
Unknown
There are no posted rules and no sidebar description for the audit to read. A missing rule doesn't mean an absent one; the checker has nothing to cite yet. Treat an unknown subreddit the same way you'd treat a banned one until you've read its wiki, pinned posts, and recent removed threads yourself.
What 999 subreddits say about promotion
Radar has audited 999 subreddits since 2026-09-05. 742 of those had rules posted directly on the subreddit; the rest were judged from the sidebar description, since some communities never formalized rules at all.
Counting only the subreddits with actual evidence to read (810 of the 999, excluding the 189 marked unknown), the split looks like this:
- Banned: 49%
- Restricted: 31%
- Allowed: 20%
In plain terms: for every five communities with a stated policy, roughly two and a half ban self-promotion outright, one and a half allow it under a condition, and one allows it outright. Founders who assume Reddit is generally promotion-friendly are working from the wrong base rate.
Among the restricted verdicts, the condition the rule states breaks down like this:
- A designated thread or day: 50 subreddits
- A participation ratio, commonly the 10% rule: 35 subreddits
- A flair requirement: 27 subreddits
- Mod approval or permission needed first: 27 subreddits
And among the banned verdicts, 32 still leave a narrow door open: they confine promotion to one designated thread, even while banning it everywhere else in the subreddit. Missing that thread and posting anywhere else in the community is what gets the ban.
The audit includes this sample. Verdict and rule cited exactly as read:
| Subreddit | Verdict | Rule cited |
|---|---|---|
| r/startups | Banned | Rule 2 prohibits direct sales, advertisements, or promotional posts of any kind; promotion confined to designated threads. |
| r/smallbusiness | Banned | Rule 3 prohibits business promotion posts outside the weekly thread; rule 1 restricts posts to questions. |
| r/marketing | Banned | Rules 2 and 7 prohibit self-promotion and shilling. |
| r/webdev | Banned | Rule 3 prohibits self-promotion; rule 4 bans commercial promotions. |
| r/sales | Banned | Rule 2: No Selling or Self Promotion, immediate permanent ban. |
| r/technology | Banned | "Do not submit anything you have personally written or any projects, websites, or companies you are affiliated with." |
| r/saas | Restricted | Promotion allowed only if relevant and helpful; feedback requests confined to the weekly thread. |
| r/entrepreneur | Restricted | Rule 2 prohibits self-promotion as the primary purpose but allows citing your own content within a helpful answer. |
| r/datascience | Restricted | Rule 7 limits self-promotion to a 1:9 ratio. |
| r/macapps | Restricted | Rule 2 limits self-promotion to once per month and requires disclosing the relationship in comments. |
| r/indiehackers | Restricted | Self-promotion allowed once with the SHOW IH flair, for feedback. |
| r/chatgpt | Restricted | Rule 3 confines self-advertising to the weekly self-promotional mega thread. |
| r/photography | Restricted | Rule 4: self-promotion only in weekly community threads, limited to 10% of submissions. |
| r/sideproject | Allowed | Sidebar describes a place for sharing side projects and receiving feedback. |
| r/buildinpublic | Allowed | Rule 3 permits sharing work with context and asking for feedback. |
| r/genealogy | Allowed | Rule 3: "Posting your own site or work is OK in moderation". |
| r/alphaandbetausers | Allowed | Launch and feedback venue. |
| r/indiebiz | Allowed | Launch and feedback venue. |
That last pair, r/alphaandbetausers and r/indiebiz, sit in a small group of launch venues (alongside r/betatests, r/roastmystartup, r/micro_saas, r/saasbuild, r/producthuntlaunches, and r/scaleinpublic) that exist specifically for people to share what they built. The rule cited there is short because the whole subreddit is the designated thread.
Reading a rule the way a moderator does
The checker doesn't skim a subreddit's rules for a general impression. It looks for specific words that moderators themselves use to write promotion rules: self-promotion, advertising, spam, vendors, affiliate, links, solicit, and phrases like "your product" or "your own." When one of those appears attached to a restriction, that's the sentence the verdict quotes.
"No spam" almost always covers a founder's pitch, even though a founder rarely thinks of their own reply as spam. Most subreddits don't define spam narrowly as bulk or automated posting. They define it by intent and pattern: content that exists to benefit the poster commercially, posted by someone whose account looks like it showed up to sell something. A single well-written comment that names your product, in a subreddit whose rule says "no spam" and nothing more specific, is read by most moderators as exactly the thing the rule was written to stop. The checker treats a bare "no spam" or "no advertising" rule as banned unless the subreddit's other rules carve out an exception.
Karma and account-age gates get parsed the same way, out of the rule text itself. A rule that says "accounts must have 100 comment karma to post" or "your account must be at least 30 days old to comment" gets pulled out and shown separately from the promotion verdict, because it's a gate on participation at all, not specifically on promotion. Plenty of subreddits that allow self-promotion still won't let a two-day-old account do it. The checker surfaces both numbers when they exist so you know if you're even eligible to comment before you plan what to say.
Reddit's sitewide baseline
Subreddit rules sit on top of Reddit's own sitewide policies, and those apply everywhere regardless of what an individual community's sidebar says.
Reddit's content policy prohibits spamming and other forms of content manipulation, and asks users to post authentic content in communities where they have a genuine interest, not content that exists primarily to promote something they run or profit from. Reddit's content policy, read 2026-09-14.
Reddiquette, Reddit's own etiquette guide, puts it more memorably: it's fine to be a redditor with a website, it's not fine to be a website with a Reddit account. This is where the widely cited 10% guideline comes from: if roughly more than a tenth of your activity is submitting or promoting your own material, that pattern reads as spam to both moderators and Reddit's own systems, even without a single subreddit rule being broken. Reddiquette, read 2026-09-14.
Reddit's help article on spam is the most direct: it tells users that if their contributions consist primarily of links to a business they run, own, or otherwise benefit from, they should be thoughtful about how often they post those links, or consider Reddit's advertising products instead of organic posting. Reddit Help: Spam, read 2026-09-14.
None of these sitewide pages replace a subreddit's own rules. A subreddit can be stricter than Reddit's baseline (most of the banned verdicts in the audit are), but it can't be looser in a way that protects you from a sitewide spam action. Passing a subreddit's local promotion rule and still posting the same pitch in forty subreddits in one afternoon can get the account actioned sitewide, rule-compliant or not.
A reply template for each verdict
Generic examples using a fictional "time tracker" product. Nothing here refers to a real thread, subreddit, or brand. Swap in your own product's actual facts and adjust the length to the community.
Allowed (disclosure, one bare url):
I ran into the same thing tracking hours across three client projects. What worked for me was logging time in short blocks right after I finished a task instead of trying to reconstruct the day at 6pm, the numbers were always wrong when I did it that way. Full disclosure, I built a time tracker for exactly this, timetracker.example. Happy to answer questions about how the block logging works if it's useful.
Restricted (disclosure, no link):
Once you're billing more than one client, the fix that helped most was separating "time worked" from "time billable" as two different fields, since they're rarely the same number. I'll say upfront I built a time tracker that does this, since the sub's rule asks for that disclosure, but I won't drop a link here. Happy to answer questions about the approach in the thread.
Banned (help only, no product name):
Two things helped me: log time in short blocks right after each task instead of at the end of the day, and keep "worked" and "billable" as separate numbers so you can see where the gap is. Once you see it in writing it's usually obvious which client is the problem.
Mistakes that get founders banned even when a mention is allowed
An allowed or restricted verdict is not a blank check. Most of the founders who get banned from a subreddit that technically permits promotion get banned for how they did it, not for doing it.
- Pace: One pitch per subreddit, then a cooldown, not a pitch every time a relevant thread appears. Posting your product in the same subreddit every week reads as spam even in a subreddit whose rules allow occasional self-promotion.
- Copy-paste: Posting the same reply, or a reworded version of it, across many subreddits in a short window. Moderators and Reddit's own systems both catch this pattern quickly, and it's one of the fastest routes to a sitewide spam flag regardless of what any single subreddit's rules say.
- Mention placement: Naming the product in the first line instead of after the actual help. A reply that opens with the product reads as an ad with some padding around it. A reply that opens by answering the question and mentions the product only near the end reads as a person who happened to build something relevant.
- Posing as a user: Recommending "a tool I use" without saying you built it. This turns a reply that would have been fine with disclosure into one that gets removed and reported once someone checks your post history.
- Links where a name would do: Dropping a bare url in a subreddit whose restricted rule wants a product name and a mention of your relationship to it, not a link. Read what the rule asks for. Some want a link, some don't.
Where this data comes from
Radar doesn't use Reddit's official API and doesn't log into Reddit on your behalf. The rules and sidebar text behind every verdict come from a licensed commercial data provider, the same one Radar's product uses to find and screen threads. Rules get re-read weekly, and a subreddit's verdict is cached for that period once it's been checked, which is why most lookups on this page answer instantly. A community that has never been audited gets fetched through the data provider on the spot, classified by the same model Radar's product uses to read rules, and the result is cached for everyone who checks it afterward.
The audit itself started on 2026-09-05, one day after I got permanently banned from r/startups for a reply I thought was helpful but hadn't read the sub's rule against. That followed a 28-day ban from r/SaaS for the same mistake. I built this checker, and the product behind it, to stop guessing at what a subreddit's rules said before I replied. If you want to scan your own site and see where it fits before you post anywhere, that's free: Scan my site free.
FAQ
Can I promote my product on Reddit at all?
Yes, in a meaningful share of subreddits. In the audit, 20% of subreddits with a stated policy allow self-promotion outright and another 31% allow it under a specific condition. The other 49% ban it. Check the subreddit before you post, since the split varies a lot by community.
What does a "banned" verdict actually mean for my reply?
It means don't name your product in a normal post or comment there. You can still reply and help, you just leave the product out. Some banned subreddits confine promotion to one designated thread instead of banning it everywhere, and the checker's cited rule will say so when that's the case.
Why does the checker show "unknown" instead of just picking one?
Because a subreddit with no posted rules and no sidebar description gives the audit nothing to cite. Guessing that no rules means no restriction is exactly the mistake that gets founders banned. Unknown means read the community yourself before you post, the same way you'd treat a banned verdict.
Does disclosure alone make a mention okay?
Not by itself. Disclosure (saying you built the thing) is necessary almost everywhere self-promotion is allowed at all, but it doesn't override a restricted subreddit's specific condition, like a designated thread or a flair requirement, and it does nothing in a banned subreddit.
How often is the rules data updated?
Rules are re-read weekly. A verdict you see today reflects the last read within that window. Subreddits change their rules, so a subreddit that was restricted last month can tighten to banned, which is part of why the checker reads current rule text instead of relying on a fixed list.
Is this the same data Radar's paid product uses?
Yes. The checker runs the same rule-reading process Radar uses to label every subreddit it scans for a founder's product, and the same cache. The reply checker and the best time to post tool draw on related parts of that same pipeline. The paid product adds thread discovery, scoring, and drafting on top, which this free tool doesn't do. For more on how the rules themselves tend to be written, see the guide to Reddit's self-promotion rules.