Protected reads and the public status exception
Protected reads use GET under https://api.redditapilabs.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 and exclude it from public notebooks. The account panel's Secure HttpOnly session cookie is separate from retrieval authentication. Signup displays the key once immediately before payment; no key-confirmation step is required.
/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, flat fields and your saved input
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.
The min_score parameter functions strictly as a filter, not a sorting control. Results use internal _doc order, not chronology, relevance or score. Neither query positions nor local sorting establish a stable dataset. A protocol should retain actual responses and local code versions; it should not imply that an identical request will return identical or merely slightly changed data.
Responses from the server consist of flat records rather than assembled thread trees. This design choice means that parent-child relationships must be resolved by the client application using available metadata. While fields like parent_id or link_id may be present, there is no guarantee of complete ancestry, so local grouping logic remains optional and should be handled defensively. Responses contain data, pagination and credits. Individual fields can be absent or vary; record those observations before applying local transformations. No search filter accepts parent_id or link_id.
Page boundaries, totals and failure handling
Content routes accept limit and page from 1 to 100, with a separate request for every page. A sequence of calls does not guarantee 10000 distinct records or a complete dataset. There is no page=101 for the same query. Splitting dates and local deduplication can organize work without certifying exhaustive retrieval. A local run identifier or saved-file hash is not a server-issued snapshot token.
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.
