You are sitting in front of the Reddit Premium upsell, again, wondering if $5.99 a month is finally worth it. Maybe the ads have gotten heavier. Maybe you read a thread that said Premium gives you free coins every month. Maybe you just want Reddit to feel a little less like a slot machine. So you go looking for a straight answer, and you mostly find listicles that copy each other and a perk list that has not been updated in two years.
Here is the short version before the long one. Reddit Premium in 2026 is a fine ad-blocker subscription with a few cosmetic extras stapled on. It is not the deal it was, because the single perk that used to justify the price has been quietly removed. And it does nothing at all for the one Reddit feature that genuinely frustrates heavy users.
This post breaks down exactly what Premium gets you today, what it used to include and silently dropped, and how the math actually works against the free account. Then it covers the thing none of the other comparisons mention, which is that paying Reddit money will not fix your saved posts, no matter how much you spend.
- Reddit Premium is worth it only if you want ad-free Reddit and will pay for convenience. For most people it is a skip.
- It costs $5.99/month or $49.99/year and gives you ad-free browsing, r/lounge, custom app icons, avatar gear, and higher post and video limits.
- The old 700-coins-a-month perk is gone. Reddit killed coins in 2023, so any guide still listing it is out of date.
- Premium does not raise the ~1,000 saved posts limit. That cap is the same for free and paid accounts.
- It does not boost your karma, post reach, or visibility. You are paying for comfort, not advantage.
What you get with Reddit Premium in 2026
Reddit Premium is Reddit’s paid subscription. It costs $5.99 per month, or $49.99 if you pay for a year up front. Going by the Reddit Help Center, here is what the money buys you today.
- Ad-free browsing. No promoted posts, no banner ads, across desktop and the official apps. This is the main event.
- Access to r/lounge. A members-only subreddit just for Premium subscribers. It exists. People post in it. Most subscribers look once and never return.
- Custom app icons and avatar gear. Cosmetic. Change how the Reddit icon looks on your phone, dress up your Snoo avatar.
- Higher content limits. Longer post bodies and longer video uploads than a free account gets. Useful if you write long or post video, irrelevant to almost everyone else.
- Comment highlighting and account analytics. Premium flags new comments since your last visit on a thread and shows you basic performance stats on your own posts.
That is the real list. Read it twice, because it is shorter and thinner than the marketing makes it feel. Strip away the cosmetics and the niche power-poster features, and what you are actually paying $5.99 a month for is to turn the ads off.
What Reddit Premium quietly dropped
Here is the part the copy-paste guides keep getting wrong, and it changes the whole value calculation.
For years, Reddit Premium’s headline perk was not the ad removal. It was the coins. Every month, your subscription dropped a coin allowance, often quoted as 700 coins, into your account. You used those coins to give awards on posts and comments you liked. The coins had a real-money value, so the perk read like a partial rebate on the subscription. “Pay $6, get back a couple of dollars in coins” made the price feel softer.
Those coins are gone. In July 2023, Reddit announced it was killing coins and the entire awards system, and the shutdown completed that September. Reddit later brought awards back under a different currency called Reddit Gold, but that is a separate pay-as-you-go thing tied to its creator payout program. It is not bundled into your Premium subscription. The monthly allowance that used to come with Premium does not exist anymore.
So if you are reading a 2026 “is Reddit Premium worth it” article that still lists “700 monthly coins” as a benefit, you are reading a stale article. The perk that made the price make sense was removed two and a half years ago, and the price did not drop to match. You are paying the same $5.99 for a noticeably shorter list.
Reddit Premium vs free, side by side
Here is the honest comparison, with the dead perks left out.
| Feature | Free | Premium ($5.99/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Ads | Shown | Removed |
| r/lounge access | No | Yes |
| Custom app icons + avatar gear | No | Yes |
| Longer posts + videos | Standard caps | Raised caps |
| Monthly coins | Gone for everyone | Gone for everyone |
| Saved posts limit | ~1,000 | ~1,000 (same) |
| Karma, reach, visibility | Same | Same |
The shape of the table is the answer. Premium changes the browsing experience and adds some cosmetics. It changes nothing about how Reddit actually works for you as a place to save, find, and reuse things. The limits that frustrate people are identical on both sides of the paywall.
Is Reddit Premium worth $5.99 a month?
Run the math against the one thing it really sells, ad removal.
If your whole reason for considering Premium is the ads, you have a free option already. Browser extensions like uBlock Origin strip Reddit’s ads on desktop at no cost. On mobile the picture is messier, and that is where Premium has a genuine pitch, a clean ad-free Reddit on the official app without sideloading anything. If you live in the Reddit app on your phone and you hate the ads, $5.99 for that is a defensible purchase. Plenty of people happily pay more than that for less.
For everyone else, it is hard to justify. The cosmetics are forgettable. The r/lounge is a quiet room you will visit once. The raised post and video limits matter only if you are a heavy poster. And the perk that used to tip the scale, the coins, is no longer on the table. You are buying comfort on one platform, which is fine, as long as you go in knowing that is all you are buying.
One thing Premium explicitly does not buy you is any advantage. It will not grow your karma faster, push your posts higher, or change how communities treat you. Reddit is careful about that, and it is the right call, but it means there is no competitive reason to subscribe. You are not falling behind by staying free.
The one Reddit problem Premium won’t fix
Now the thing none of the other comparisons mention.
The single most common complaint from heavy Reddit users is not ads. It is that their saved posts keep vanishing. You tap save on something genuinely useful, a recipe, a long technical answer, a comment you want to find again, and months later it is nowhere. The list scrolls to a stop and the thing you wanted is gone.
That is not a bug, and it is not something Premium fixes. Reddit’s saved list is what the platform calls a listing, and the Reddit developer API caps every listing at 1,000 items. When you save your 1,001st post, your oldest one silently drops off the reachable end. This happens to free and Premium accounts in exactly the same way, because the cap lives in the API, not in your billing status. We pull apart the full mechanics in the Reddit saved posts limit explainer.
So if any part of your reason for eyeing Premium is “maybe paying will let me keep more saves,” stop. It will not. There is no Reddit subscription tier, current or retired, that raises the saved posts cap. The save button is a back pocket Reddit never built to be an archive, and money does not change its shape. It also will not stop a saved post from dying when the original poster deletes it, which is its own quiet way of losing the social bookmarks you cared about.
How to actually fix Reddit saves without Premium
If saves are your real pain, the fix costs nothing and has nothing to do with Premium. There are two separate jobs, and Reddit handles neither.
Recover what you already lost. Request your official Reddit data export at reddit.com/settings/data-request. It is built from Reddit’s stored records rather than the capped live feed, so it reaches saves from past the 1,000 wall. The catch is that it hands you bare links, not the post content. The full process, and the workarounds that go further, are in the Reddit 1000 save limit guide.
Protect what you save next. Capture each post into your own store the moment you save it, so it never depends on Reddit’s listing surviving. A browser tool that watches your saves and keeps its own copy sidesteps the cap entirely, because your copy is safe even after Reddit ages the original off. The official help docs only ever describe the in-app save, which is the very thing that forgets.
This is the category ContextBolt sits in, and full disclosure, it is the tool I build, so weigh that. It is a Chrome extension that records each Reddit save as you make it, alongside your X and LinkedIn saves, and keeps the content rather than a link that can rot. It tags every save by topic and searches by meaning, so months later you find the thread by what it was about, not the exact words you remember. The free Basic tier covers 150 saves with that tagging and search, which is already more retrieval than the native list gives you. We get into the search side in how to search 1000+ Reddit saved posts instantly.
The point is not that you should buy something instead of Premium. The point is that the problem you might be hoping Premium solves has a free answer that lives outside Reddit entirely.
The honest take
Reddit Premium is a comfort purchase. If you want a clean, ad-free Reddit on your phone and $5.99 a month does not sting, buy it and enjoy it. There is no shame in paying to remove ads from a site you spend real time on. Just go in with your eyes open about what the 2026 version actually is, a shorter perk list than the internet still advertises, minus the coins that used to make it feel like a bargain.
What Premium is not is a fix for anything structural about how Reddit works. It does not make you more visible, it does not protect your saves, and it does not unlock a bigger archive. Those are not paywalled features Reddit is dangling, they are just things Reddit never built, for free or paid users alike.
So decide on the ads, because that is the only real question. If ad-free mobile Reddit is worth six dollars to you, the answer is yes. If you are subscribing for the coins, the saves, or some edge over other users, the answer is no, and it has been no since 2023. Spend the six dollars where it actually changes something. For your saves, that is a tool that keeps its own copy, not a subscription to the platform that keeps forgetting them.