We Checked the Self-Promotion Rules of 49 Subreddits Founders Pitch In. 61% Ban It.
Reddit is stricter than founders think
Every "grow on Reddit" guide tells you to go post in r/Entrepreneur, r/marketing, or r/SaaS. So we did the boring thing and read the actual, published rules of 49 subreddits that founders and marketers most often pitch in. We pulled each community's live rule set directly from Reddit, classified its self-promotion policy, and recorded the exact quoted rule and a last-checked date for every one.
The headline: 61% of these communities either ban self-promotion outright or only permit it under Reddit's 9-to-1 rule. The full breakdown:
- 39% ban it outright (19 of 49). Direct promotion is removed, and several hand out permanent bans for it.
- 22% allow it only under the 9-to-1 rule (11 of 49). At most 1 in 10 of your contributions can be promotional.
- 37% are case-by-case (18 of 49). Usually a relevant mention in a reply, or a designated weekly thread.
- 2% openly welcome it (1 of 49). Exactly one: r/SideProject.
The reputations are often wrong
The most useful finding was how often a subreddit's promo reputation did not match its written rule. When we checked our own earlier classifications against the live rules, we had to reclassify 24 of the 49, almost always toward stricter.
- r/Entrepreneur (5.2M members) is widely treated as promo-friendly. Its actual rule: "Do not use this community to sell, promote, recruit, hire, job-seek, solicit investment, or drive traffic to your profile, company, or external content." That is a ban.
- r/marketing (1.9M) has a "zero tolerance policy to Advertising, Self-Promotion, and Spam" with a permanent ban attached.
- r/productivity, r/freelance, r/sales, r/digitalnomad, and r/UXDesign all read as promo-friendly and all ban it.
A few genuinely allow it, with conditions: r/indiehackers lets you self-promote once using the SHOW IH flair, for feedback not advertisement. r/SaaS allows an occasional mention capped at once every 60 days with disclosure. Several communities (r/devops, r/Notion, r/smallbusiness, r/EtsySellers) confine promotion to a weekly thread.
Look up any subreddit before you post
We turned the whole thing into a free, browsable database. Search any of the 49 communities to see its policy, the exact quoted rule, posting requirements, and the highest-intent moment to reach its members without getting banned. The aggregate data is free to cite under CC BY 4.0, and the full dataset is downloadable as a CSV.
The uncomfortable takeaway for anyone planning a Reddit "promotion" campaign: in most of the rooms you want to be in, promoting is against the rules. The growth that survives is not posting your link, it is being genuinely useful in the exact threads where someone is already asking for what you sell, and mentioning your product only when it actually helps.