Reddit Karma & Warmup Calculator

Why new accounts get banned

Reddit's spam defences read account signals: age, karma, and behaviour pattern. A day-old account whose first action is submitting a link matches the spammer template exactly, so automod in most large subreddits holds or removes it. Crucially, it does this silently. The post appears normal to you and is invisible to everyone else, which is why so many founders conclude that Reddit is broken rather than that they were filtered.

Beneath the filters sits the layer that actually does the banning: a moderator, opening your profile after something you posted drew attention, and skimming what fraction of the account is about its own product. That skim is the whole test. It is why warmup is not a trick to fool machines but the process of accumulating a history worth not banning, and why an account that skips it can have plenty of karma and still get removed on its first promotional post.

How the phase is computed

Two axes, and the answer is the lower of the two. Your account age allows a certain phase, your total karma allows a certain phase, and your real phase is whichever is more conservative. Age is the primary gate because it cannot be faked or farmed. Karma is guidance, and it moves faster.

This matters more than it sounds. An account two years old with five karma is not a mature account, it is a dormant one, and it lands in Phase 1 with the brand new accounts. A sixty-day account with 200 karma lands in Phase 4. Grinding karma on a two-week-old account moves nothing, because age is what is holding it. The calculator tells you which of the two is your actual constraint, which is the only genuinely actionable number on the page.

Where these thresholds come from

Honest sourcing, because the numbers matter. Reddit publishes no sitewide karma threshold, and each subreddit configures its own automod without publishing the settings. The 50 to 100 karma band is the pattern that community guidance converges on, r/NewToReddit being the most consistently cited source, and it matches what founders report clearing filters in practice.

The self-promotion side has a real paper trail. Reddit's 2014 moderator clarification on r/modnews put it in one sentence: “For every 1 time you post self-promotional content, 9 other posts (submissions or comments) should not contain self-promotional content.” Reddit's current small-business posting guide restates the same idea as “be a user first”, asking for at least nine non-promotional interactions per business-related post. Individual subreddits then go stricter: r/SaaS's 2026 rule update says accounts that exist mainly to promote will be removed.

The four-phase day boundaries themselves (14, 30, 45, and then open) are VoicePost's own model, not something Reddit publishes. They were set to be conservative on purpose: nothing bad happens if you warm up for longer than strictly necessary, and the downside of being wrong in the other direction is a banned account you cannot appeal.

Karma is a floor, not a licence

Clearing the filters is the beginning. Once you can post, the thing that determines whether promotion survives is the ratio: how much of your account is about your own product. The working number is one promotional contribution in nine, judged across your account rather than per post, and it is the single most common reason founders with plenty of karma still get removed.

A second ratio sits underneath it: among your actual posts, at most one promotional post per three value posts, and each promo should pass the mention-deletion test, meaning it would still be worth reading with your product name stripped out. You can check where you currently sit with the ban risk checker, which is the natural next step once this page says Phase 4.

Glossary

• Warmup phase. How far an account is through the sequence from comment-only to self-promotion-allowed. Computed from account age and karma together, taking the more conservative of the two.
• Karma. Reddit's cumulative vote score, split into comment karma and post karma. It functions as an automated gate for posting in large subreddits and carries almost no weight with human moderators after that.
• Shadowban. A restriction where your posts and comments are visible to you but to nobody else, applied without notification. Distinct from a subreddit ban, which you are told about, and from an automod removal, which affects one post.
• Automod. The per-subreddit rule engine that holds or removes submissions based on account age, karma, and content patterns before a human ever sees them.
• The 9:1 rule. The self-promotion ratio: roughly one promotional contribution per nine that are not. Account level, not per post.

What to actually do in each phase

Phase 1 is comments only, two or three a day, in subreddits where you can answer a question you genuinely know the answer to. No links, no product, and no “great post” filler, which reads as farming. Phase 2 adds text posts: a writeup of something you learned, a comparison you actually ran, an honest failure story. Phase 3 adds links you did not make, which is also how you learn what each subreddit upvotes before the stakes rise. Phase 4 opens promotion at roughly one post a week, inside the ratio.

The full sequence, including how to pick the subreddits and what to do when a post gets silently filtered, is in the warmup guide.