How to reply to Reddit threads about your product without getting banned

Moderators and regular users pattern-match fast, and three shapes get flagged before anyone reads the words: link-first replies (a URL in the first sentence, before any answer), template reuse(the same paragraph posted across several threads — moderators compare notes, and Reddit's own spam tooling is built to catch exactly this), and fabricated first-person stories("I had this same problem, then I found..." when you're the person who built the thing). None of these require a rule you haven't read — they're recognizable on sight, which is why they get removed fast and why the account behind them gets watched afterward.

The fix for all three is the same structural move: answer the actual question first, in your own words, specific to that thread — then, only if it's genuinely relevant, name what you built and say plainly that you built it.

The number most people quote is "9:1"— only 1 in 10 of your posts should be your own content. That figure is real and still published today, on Reddit's Reddiquette page: "a widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content." But Reddiquette describes itself as "an informal expression of the values of many redditors, as written by redditors themselves" — a community norm, not enforced policy.

The page that actually governs removals and bans — Reddit's Spam policy — carries no ratio at all. Its actual instruction: "Post authentic content into communities where you have a personal interest. If your contributions to Reddit consist primarily of links to a business that you run, own, or otherwise benefit from, please be thoughtful about the frequency of posting, or consider advertising opportunities using our self-serve platform." It judges frequency and intent, not arithmetic — the 9:1 figure is a useful gut-check, not a rule you can satisfy by counting.

Site-wide guidance is the floor, not the ceiling: every subreddit sets its own self-promotion rules on top of it, and they range from an outright ban to an open welcome with a required format. r/SideProject, for example, exists specifically for sharing what you built — its rules page asks only for a fixed submission shape, "[Project name] - [Short description]", no ratio, no ban. Other communities ban self-promotion entirely, or restrict it to a single weekly thread. Before you reply anywhere, open that subreddit's "Rules" or "About" page (the sidebar on desktop, the community info screen on mobile) and read it — a reply that's fine in one subreddit gets removed on sight in the next.

ReplyWell drafts replies for a living, so this list isn't theoretical — it's distilled from the rules our own drafting pipeline enforces on every reply it writes (the full history, including the failures each rule closes, is in our reply guidelines):

1. Answer first, product optional. The reply has to genuinely help with the question asked — including pointing to a free or alternative fix — before the product enters the sentence, if it enters at all.
2. Keep it short. Long replies read as blog spam, not peer help — our own drafts have an 80-word hard cap, aiming for 2-5 sentences.
3. Disclose, always, when you name or link it. If the reply names or links the product, it carries exactly one plain disclosure line — never zero, never two.
4. No invented experience.Never write "I had this problem too" or "just tried it, it worked" if you're the person who built it. Say what it does; don't pretend to be a customer.
5. Numbers only from facts you can point to.A price, a deadline, a feature claim — if you can't link the source, don't state the number.
6. One link, at most — and only one you can stand behind.Our own drafts allow at most one link, and only one that appears in the product's own stated facts, never an invented URL. Not every helpful reply needs a link at all.

Since a checklist means little without a real example: this guide itself follows it. Everything above was the actual answer to the actual question in the title — nothing here needed the product to be true. Now, briefly, the one relevant mention: ReplyWell is a tool we built that finds threads like the ones described above (across Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky and X) and drafts a reply in this same answer-first, disclosed style, which you read and post yourself — it never posts for you. The free tier covers Hacker News and Bluesky with no card required; Reddit and X are on the paid Starter plan (€19/mo), which is a waitlist today, not a live charge, until our own drafting engine clears its own public proof gate.

Disclosure: ReplyWell is our product.