r/webdev
Web developers across every experience level
- Size
- Very large
- Buying intent
- Medium
- Promotion
- Conditional
Enormous volume spanning students, freelancers and agency leads, which makes it simultaneously one of the most active communities available and one of the hardest to qualify within. The same thread can contain a beginner and a person with a five-figure tooling budget.
Tooling questions are constant. The work is filtering for the ones from people who can actually buy, which usually means looking for the posts that mention a team, a client or a deadline rather than a tutorial.
What we have measured
Lidar reads this community every day. These figures come from the 153 posts we collected here over the last 30 days, read a median of 13 hours after they were posted.
- Posts asking a question
- 25%
- Median replies when we read them
- 10
- Median upvotes when we read them
- 1
The question share is the one to weigh. A community where half the posts ask something is a community that wants answers, and a community where almost none do is one where people are broadcasting rather than asking. The engagement figures are deliberately measured at the moment we collect a post rather than at its final score, because that is the state a thread is in when replying to it is still worth doing.
What people actually post
The client problem
A freelancer or agency dealing with a real deliverable. The highest-value post type here by a wide margin.
The stack question
What to use for a given job. Volume is high and buying power is mixed.
The showcase
Portfolio and project sharing. Social rather than commercial.
What people get wrong about it
The size is read as a single audience. It spans students and agency owners, and the two require completely different approaches.
Can you promote in r/webdev?
Moderated against self-promotion with a designated showcase thread for it. Comment mentions answering a specific question are broadly fine with disclosure.
What gets you removed
Product announcements outside the designated thread. They are removed consistently regardless of quality.
A good first contribution
Answer a question from somebody working on a client project rather than a tutorial. It is the fastest way to find the part of the community with a budget.
Products that fit here
- Hosting, deployment and domains
- Frontend tooling and testing
- Agency and freelancer workflow tools
- Anything with a free tier
What does not work
Enterprise pricing. A large share of the community are individuals and small shops without a procurement process.
Timing
Steady year-round.
How it compares to the neighbours
The communities closest to r/webdev, and how they differ on the three things that decide whether one is worth your time.
| Community | Size | Intent | Promotion |
|---|---|---|---|
| r/webdev | Very large | Medium | Conditional |
| r/reactjs | Very large | Medium | Conditional |
| r/node | Large | Medium | Conditional |
| r/learnprogramming | Very large | Low | Closed |
Where this fits in a wider plan
r/webdev appears in our list of the best subreddits for developer tools, which sets it against the other communities worth watching in that market. If you are starting from nothing, the six-week plan in finding your first 100 users covers how to build standing before you mention a product at all.
Watch r/webdev without reading it.
Lidar reads it every day, scores each post against what your product does, and sends you the ones worth answering. Along with the rest of engineering and infrastructure.