Can I mention my product on Reddit at all?

Yes, in the right thread, with disclosure, after you have answered the question. Reddit bans behaviour, not products: a founder who says "I built X, it does this, here is the limitation" in a thread that asked for exactly that is welcome almost everywhere. The same sentence pasted into twenty threads is spam.

Is a brand-new account a problem?

On its own, no. A new account that immediately posts links and product mentions across several subreddits is. Spend two to three weeks commenting without links, in communities you actually read, before your product appears anywhere. Age and comment karma are the cheapest trust you can buy, and they cost only time.

What is a shadowban, and how do I know if I have one?

Your posts and comments look normal to you but nobody else sees them. Reddit does not tell you. Log out, or open a private window, and look at your profile and a recent comment: if they are missing, you are shadowbanned. Appeal once through Reddit's help form, politely; do not create a new account from the same device and network in the meantime, that is ban evasion and it is detected.

Should I use several accounts to spread the risk?

No. Reddit links accounts by device, network and behaviour, and treats a second account after a ban as evasion. It also produces the exact pattern the spam filter is built to catch: the same product mentioned by different "people". One account, your real one, with a history.

Can I DM people who ask for a tool like mine?

Do not. Unsolicited DMs are the fastest route to a report, and mass-DM tools are explicitly what Reddit has been shutting down. Answer in the thread, in public, where everyone can see you were helpful.

Do tools that post replies for me get accounts banned?

Every account I have seen banned for promotion was running some form of automation: replies at volume, templated wording, no human reading the thread. Reddit's filter is built for that pattern and catches it within days. A tool that finds the threads and drafts a reply is fine; a tool that posts it is the problem.

How to promote your product on Reddit without getting banned

The short version

Reddit does not ban products. It bans a pattern: new account, links early, the same message in several subreddits, volume from day one. Avoid the pattern and you can talk about what you built.
Warm up for two to three weeks before your product exists on Reddit: real comments, no links, in communities you read anyway.
Answer the question first. The product comes last, disclosed, with a limitation, and only when the thread actually asked for it. No link unless the subreddit allows it or someone asks.
One to three replies a day, never the same text twice, and skip more threads than you answer.
One account, yours. No second account "just in case", no DMs, no tool that posts for you.

How I got two accounts banned in six days

In September 2026 I started promoting my own product on Reddit the way most founders do: I searched for threads where people were asking for something like it, and I replied. To go faster, I had a language model draft the replies. They were decent — polite, on topic, they mentioned the product by name and explained what it did. I posted them from a fresh account, in several subreddits, on the first day, and kept going the next.

The account was gone within days. I made another one and did roughly the same thing, a little more carefully. It lasted about as long. Two accounts banned in six days, and I still do not know for certain whether they were subreddit bans that escalated or site-wide suspensions, because Reddit does not tell you. What I know is the pattern I had produced, seen from the outside: a new account, several communities at once, a product name in every comment, and wording that — however polite — had the same shape each time. That is the signature of a spam bot, and I had built one by hand.

The third account, created a week after the second ban, has not mentioned the product. It comments, and it will do only that for a while. This guide is what I wish I had read before the first one, and it is also the reason Loudship, the tool I ended up building, has no "post" button.

What Reddit actually punishes

Reddit publishes its content policy and leaves the rest to two things: subreddit moderators, and an automated spam filter it says nothing about. Founders who have been through it describe a consistent set of signals. None of them is about your product. All of them are about behaviour.

Account age and karma. A days-old account with no comment history has no trust. Many subreddits reject its posts automatically; the site-wide filter treats its links with suspicion.
Links, and the ratio of links to everything else. An account whose comments mostly contain URLs, or the same domain over and over, looks like what it is.
The same text in several places. Copy-pasting a reply across subreddits, or across threads in one subreddit, is the single most reliable way to get flagged. The filter compares wording; so do moderators who see your profile.
Velocity. Ten comments in an hour from a new account is not a person discovering a community. It is a script, even when it is you.
Reports. Users report promotional comments, moderators remove them, and removals accumulate on your account. Enough of them and the next removal is a ban.
Subreddit rules you did not read. Every community has its own line on self-promotion: some ban it outright, some allow it in a weekly thread, some allow it with disclosure. Breaking a rule you did not know about is still breaking it.

Put those together and you get the profile I had: young account, product name in every comment, several subreddits, similar wording, all at once. Any one of these is survivable. All of them together are not.

Warm up before your product exists on Reddit

The cheapest trust on Reddit is time and comments. Before your product appears anywhere, spend two to three weeks being a normal member of the communities you will later want to speak in. This is not a trick; it is what the accounts that survive look like, because they belong to people who were there before they had something to sell.

Pick three to five subreddits you genuinely read: where your users are, and where you have something to say that is not about your product.
Comment on things you know. Answer questions, share an opinion, disagree politely. No links. No mention of what you are building.
Aim for a comment history that a moderator can scroll through and recognise as a person. A few dozen comments over a few weeks, with some karma, is enough.
Read each subreddit's rules, the pinned posts and the weekly threads. Note where self-promotion is allowed, where it is tolerated with disclosure, and where it is forbidden. Write it down: you will want it when you draft replies later.

If you are using an old personal account instead, you can skip the waiting, but not the reading. And if that account has ever been banned from a subreddit, do not go back there.

What a reply that survives looks like

The replies that get founders banned share a structure: the product comes first, the help comes second or not at all, and the text would work in any thread because it was written for none of them. Reverse every part of that.

Answer the question first, completely. If someone asks how to do X, tell them how to do X — including ways that do not involve your product. If your product is the only good answer you have, and you cannot add anything else, that thread might not be for you.

Mention the product last, with disclosure, with a limitation. "I built a tool for this, it does A and B; it does not do C yet, so if you need C look elsewhere." The disclosure ("I built") is not optional: hidden promotion is what people report. The limitation is what makes the rest believable, and it is the part a spam bot would never write.

No link unless the subreddit allows it or the person asks. Name the product, let them search. A reply without a URL is read as a recommendation; the same reply with a URL is read as an ad. If someone replies asking for the link, that is the moment.

Written for this thread only. Refer to something specific the author said. Match the length and tone of the other comments. If you could paste your reply into another thread unchanged, it is not ready.

Read the whole thread before posting. The question in the title is often answered in the comments already, or the author has clarified they want something else, or a moderator has already said "no tools please". I did not always do this, and in hindsight it shows.

A bad reply and a good one, side by side

Say you built an invoicing tool for freelancers, and someone in a freelancing subreddit writes: "Client is 45 days late on a $3k invoice, third time this year. How do you all deal with this without losing the client?"

The reply that gets you banned:

Great question! Late payments are a huge pain for freelancers. I built [Product] to solve exactly this — it sends automatic reminders, tracks overdue invoices and lets clients pay in one click. Check it out at product.com, there's a free trial!

Nothing in it is false. It is still spam: it does not answer the question (the author asked how to handle a late client, not how to send reminders), it leads with the product, it contains a link nobody asked for, and it could be pasted under any thread that contains the word "invoice". The "Great question!" opener is a tell that no one read the thread.

The reply that survives:

Third time in a year is the real problem, not this invoice. What worked for me: a short, unemotional note on day 31 ("Invoice #12 was due on the 3rd, can you confirm when it will be paid?"), then a call, not an email, at day 45 — people pay the person they spoke to. For the next project, 50% upfront and a late fee in the contract; a client who balks at that was going to pay late anyway. You will not lose a good client over clear terms. You might lose this one, and that may be fine.
Full disclosure, I built a small invoicing tool that automates the reminder part; it does nothing about the phone call or the contract, which is where your problem actually is.

Same product, same founder. The second reply answers the question, in the author's terms, with something they can do today. The product appears at the end, disclosed, with a limitation, and without a link. If the author wants it, they will ask, and that public exchange is worth more than any link.

If a model writes your first draft

I am not going to tell you never to use a language model; I built a tool that does. What got my accounts banned was not that a model wrote the drafts, it was that I posted them as they came, at volume. A first draft is fine under three conditions.

It is written from your facts, not from the model's imagination. A model that does not know what your product does will invent a feature, and a false claim in a public thread costs you the community, not just the comment. Give it the facts you have checked, the things it must never claim, and the limitations you want stated.
You rewrite it for the thread. Cut the opener, refer to something specific the author said, match the length of the other comments, and take out anything you would not say out loud. If the draft comes with a warning — this subreddit forbids promotion, the snippet might be a commenter rather than the author — read it.
You post it, by hand, from your own account. Not the tool. The moment a tool posts for you, you have volume, uniform wording and no human reading the thread: the exact pattern from the first section.

The tell-tale signs of a pasted draft are known to every moderator: "Great question!", tidy bullet points under a one-line question, a closing sentence that summarises, and a product name in the last line of every comment on the profile. Any of these is a reason to rewrite.

Where self-promotion is actually welcome

Not every mention has to be smuggled into a reply. Reddit has places built for showing what you made, and using them is both allowed and effective.

Communities made for it. r/SideProject exists so people can share side projects; a post there with a real story (what you built, why, what you learned) is the point of the subreddit, not a violation of it.
Weekly threads. Many large subreddits have a recurring thread for exactly this — r/webdev's "Showoff Saturday" is the best known. The rule in those threads is usually still "be a person": say what it is, what it does not do, and answer the replies.
"What are you working on" threads. Common in founder and developer communities; low-key, and a good place for a first mention from a warmed-up account.
Threads that ask. "What tool do you use for X?", "Is there anything that does Y?" — these are invitations. Answer with disclosure and a limitation, as above.

What these have in common: the community decided where promotion goes. Post there, and everywhere else be the person who helps.

Volume, cadence and the discipline of skipping

Your product is relevant to fewer threads than you think, and you should answer even fewer than that. One to three replies a day is plenty. Zero on some days is fine. Never two replies with the same substance in the same day, and never the same text twice, ever.

The discipline that matters most is skipping. A thread where the author is venting, where the question was already answered, where the community forbids promotion, where your product is a stretch — skip it. Every skipped thread is a report that did not happen. When I look back at the comments that got my accounts banned, the problem was not any single reply. It was that I answered everything that mentioned the topic, because I had a tool that made replies cheap. The cost was not the reply. The cost was the account.

Finding the threads without becoming the problem

You need to find the conversations where people are asking for what you built; that part is legitimate and it is where the value is. The trap is what the tools do once they have found them.

Reddit's own search works, if you check it every day and search well. Keyword alerts tell you a word appeared, which is mostly noise: "Lightroom" appears in threads about Lightroom, not in threads where someone needs an alternative. The tools that got founders banned went one step further and posted the reply for them, at volume, from accounts that had never read the thread. That step is the whole problem — here is why, mechanically. A tool can find the thread, and it can even draft a reply from facts you have approved; it must never post. You read, you decide, you post — from your own account, at the pace of a person. That is the line Loudship is built on, and it is why it never will have a "post" button.

When a moderator removes your comment

It will happen, even when you did everything right. Do not repost. Do not argue in the thread. If the removal reason is not obvious, send the moderators one short, polite message asking what rule you broke, so you do not break it again — then accept the answer. A removed comment is a signal about that community's line; a reposted comment is a signal about you.

If your account is suspended site-wide, appeal once through Reddit's help form, with a plain explanation of what you did and what you will change. Then wait. Do not create a new account from the same device and network while the appeal is open: Reddit treats that as ban evasion, links the accounts, and both are gone.

A realistic first month

If you are starting from nothing, here is what the calendar looks like when it works. It is slower than you want. It is also the only version that still has an account at the end.

Weeks 1 to 3: be a member. Three to five subreddits you actually read. A few comments a day, no links, no product. Read the rules and the weekly threads. Notice which questions come up again and again — those are your future threads.
Week 4: the first mentions. One or two a day at most, only in threads that asked, each one answering the question first. A post in the community or weekly thread made for it, with the story rather than the pitch.
Month 2 onward: a rhythm. Check for new threads daily, answer the few that fit, skip the rest. Keep commenting on things that have nothing to do with your product; that history is what makes the mentions acceptable. Watch for removals and adjust to each community's line.

Measured against a spam tool, this is absurdly slow: a handful of mentions a week instead of dozens a day. Measured against results, it is not close. A reply from a member with a history, in a thread that asked, gets read, upvoted and searched for months. The dozens a day get removed, and take the account with them.

The checklist, before every reply

Have I read the whole thread, including the comments?
Is the author actually asking for something my product does — not just mentioning the topic?
Does this subreddit allow product mentions here, today, in this kind of thread?
Does my reply answer the question fully, before any mention of my product?
Did I disclose that I built it, and state one thing it does not do?
Is there a link? If yes, did the rules or the author ask for it?
Does this reply refer to something specific in this thread?
Have I posted anything with the same substance today?
Is my account old enough, and is this reply consistent with what it has been doing?
Would I be comfortable if the moderator read my last twenty comments?

If any answer is no, skip. There will be another thread tomorrow.

What changed after the bans

The third account comments and does nothing else, for now. When it starts talking about what I built, it will be in threads that asked, with disclosure, a limitation, and no link. One or two a day. Every draft I use gets rewritten for the thread. And nothing posts on my behalf, because I have already seen where that leads.

Reddit is still the best place on the internet to find the exact person who needs the thing you made, at the moment they need it. That is worth the patience. Two banned accounts is the price I paid to learn that the patience is the whole strategy.