There is a category of Reddit marketing service with a seductive pitch: "Comments post from our aged, high-karma accounts, so your own account carries zero ban risk." You pick a thread, they write or you write a comment mentioning your product, and one of their accounts posts it. Prices work out to roughly $10 per comment.

We paid $100 for a month of the best-known one, Bazzly, and used it to promote one of our own products (an influencer marketing tool) for two weeks. We did not trust the vendor dashboard to tell us how it went. We checked every comment from the outside, logged out, on a schedule.

Here is everything we measured.

The setup

  • 17 comments posted over two weeks, all mentioning our product as plain text, no links.
  • Posted by Bazzly's pool accounts: aged (the two we spot-checked were roughly 2 and 8 years old), high karma, profile history hidden.
  • Target threads were mostly old threads that rank on Google: 4 months to 2 years old, sitting at positions #2-#3 for buyer-intent queries, with an estimated 600 to 1,200 monthly search visits each. This is the standard playbook for these services: the thread already has traffic, your comment inherits it.
  • Bazzly bundles upvotes by default: queued comments arrived with 4 to 10 upvotes pre-ordered. We never used the standalone upvote feature (vote manipulation is enforced at the Reddit site level and we consider it radioactive), but the bundled ones shipped with the comments.
  • Verification: logged-out checks at roughly +1 hour, +24 hours, and +7 days per comment, because a removed or filtered comment looks completely normal to the account that posted it.

The scoreboard

As of July 25, two weeks in:

  • 12 of 17 comments removed by moderators. That is a 70% removal rate.
  • 4 comments verifiably live (one of those is only 22 hours old, so it is provisional).
  • Bazzly's dashboard counted 5 live. Logged out, we could only find 4. The fifth looks fine from the posting side and is invisible to everyone else, which is exactly the failure mode dashboards cannot show you.

The removal timing is the interesting part:

  • Observed removal windows: 13 hours, 23 hours, about 2 days, about 2 days, and one comment that survived 10 days before being removed.
  • None were removed instantly. Automod rules fire in seconds. Hours-to-days is the signature of human moderators working a queue and user reports.
  • Removals came in bursts. Comments posted days apart in the same subreddit disappeared together.

That last point matters if you have ever tried promo comments and concluded the results were random. They are not random, they are bursty. A mod does a sweep, everything matching the pattern goes at once, and then it is quiet for a while. And the 10-day removal means "it survived a week" is not a verdict. Any survival number needs an as-of date, including ours.

Why the comments died

Four patterns stood out in the data.

1. Template reuse is a one-pass removal vector. Two comments posted by different pool accounts shared near-verbatim sentences. Any moderator can search the subreddit for the product name and remove the whole set in one pass, which is consistent with the clustered removals we saw. Wording similarity is a liability across every account that mentions your brand, not just within one account.

2. "Threads asking for tools" are not safe harbors. All three of the fastest removals were in threads that explicitly invited software recommendations. Those threads attract shills, so they get watched harder, not softer. In the strictest subreddit we tested, we pulled a 47-comment thread logged out: only 13 comments were still visible, and zero surviving comments mentioned any vendor tool. Not just ours. All of them, from every company, were gone.

3. Old threads plus promo pattern is the target profile. Commenting on a 2-year-old thread is not something regular users do often, and moderators know it. The necro comment with a product mention and a suspiciously round number of upvotes is the exact shape promo sweeps look for.

4. Communities police themselves. In one thread we watched, an ordinary user profile-checked a different company's promoter and called them out as "essentially a dedicated account to shill the platform." Reports from users like that are what trigger the mod sweeps in the first place.

What survived, and why it matters

The removals are only half the data. Two of our comments survived 8+ days in the same subreddit that removed others within hours. Moderation is probabilistic, not exhaustive. If the subreddit had an automated filter for our brand name, there would be zero survivors.

The more useful contrast was inside a single thread. A 2-year-old comment recommending a competing tool is still up today. It was posted while the thread was live, written in first person from personal experience, by an account that was native to the conversation. Meanwhile the fresh, high-karma, upvote-boosted pool comment in the same thread died within a day.

That is the whole game in one thread: contemporaneous, first-person, and native survives. Necro, templated, and boosted dies.

The economics

Run the numbers on what $100 actually bought:

  • About 10 pool comments per month at list price.
  • 70% of them removed within two weeks.
  • Bazzly auto-detected the mod removals and refunded credits and upvotes, which is genuinely good behavior. But refunds return credits, not outcomes. You can spend them on more comments that face the same odds.
  • A removed comment on a #2-ranking Google thread reaches exactly zero searchers. The rank badge on the thread is worth nothing if your comment is not in it.

The value of a promotional comment is survival multiplied by the thread's reach. These services sell you the reach number and eat the survival number in refunds.

There is also a structural problem the pricing page does not mention: Bazzly fences its own accounts out of most niche subreddits. For the majority of relevant communities we targeted, the interface told us the subreddit was strict on promo and pool posting was off, then suggested posting from our own account instead. So the pitch of "use our accounts so yours stay safe" quietly collapses into "post from your own account" exactly where it matters, with no protection at all.

So is Bazzly worth it?

To be fair to them: the product is well built, removal detection with automatic refunds is more honest than most vendors in this space, and the thread discovery is decent. If you want bought comments, this is probably the professional end of the market.

Our verdict after a month is still no, because the problem is not the vendor, it is the mechanic. $100 a month buys about 10 comments that can only post in a handful of promo-tolerant subreddits, where 70% of them get swept by moderators within days. The refunds make the losses painless, but painless is not the same as productive. We are not renewing.

What we took away

We went in expecting to learn how the pool model protects accounts. We came out with data on why the model does not deliver outcomes, whoever's account is posting:

  1. Pace like a human. Batches of similar comments in a short window are the most diagnostic spam signal there is, links or no links.
  2. Never reuse wording. Every comment mentioning your product should be written for that thread. Similarity across comments puts every mention of your brand at risk at once.
  3. Prefer live conversations. One good comment in a thread from this week beats ten necro comments on ranking threads that get swept.
  4. Verify logged out. Dashboards, including vendor dashboards, overcount. The only view that matters is the one a stranger sees.
  5. If a subreddit removes every vendor mention, stop spending there. We burned about $30 of the $100 in a single subreddit before the pattern was undeniable.

Full disclosure: we build PulseFox, and this trial was competitive research. PulseFox takes the opposite approach: no account pools, no bought upvotes, no auto-posting. It finds the Reddit threads worth being in (both fresh conversations and threads that rank on Google or get cited by AI) and drafts replies you review and post yourself, from your own account, at a human pace.

If you want to see which subreddits and threads fit your product, the free Reddit Lead Finder shows you without an account. For the broader strategy, see How to Find Customers on Reddit Without Getting Banned and Reddit SEO: Why Old Threads Drive Compounding Traffic.