Where buyers of your software hang out on Reddit

A buyer question here is a post where someone wants software and asks other people: "Best CRM for a 5 person agency?", "Alternative to Mailchimp that won't double my bill?", "QuickBooks vs Xero for a small consultancy". I took every post title from the year that matched one of 12 software categories and a buying phrase, then sorted them into people asking, people pitching their own tool, and everything else (how-to questions, job posts, Apollo the hospital).

Two things stand out. CRM is by far the biggest category, with 1,574 questions. And web and product analytics is the only category where people pitching a tool (255) outnumber people asking for one (248).

Where each category gets asked

Some categories have a home. CRM: the top five subreddits hold 46% of questions. Social media scheduling: the top five subreddits hold 44% of questions. For CRM, r/CRMSoftware, r/CRM, r/WhichCRM alone have 651 of the 1,574 (41%).

Others have no home. In website builders and CMS, SEO tools, email marketing, project management, help desk and live chat, and web and product analytics, the top five subreddits hold less than 30% of the questions. People ask where they already talk shop: r/smallbusiness (181 questions across categories), r/DigitalMarketing (130), r/sysadmin for help desk tools. For those categories, a single "tool subreddit" will miss most of the buyers.

The 20 subreddits with the most buyer questions

Speed differs a lot between subreddits. In r/CRM half of the questions got a first reply within 16 minutes, and 3.6% got none. In r/WhichCRM, a subreddit made for exactly this question, the median wait was 16 hours and 46.2% got no reply at all. r/coldemail answered in 17 minutes; r/SaaS in 22 minutes, with 15.3% left unanswered.

Across all categories, the median first reply came after 32 minutes, 48.3% of questions had a reply within an hour, and 19.8% never got one. The median question collected 5 comments.

Who answers: buyers or sellers

About 1 in 7 top-level replies comes from someone who says they make, own or work for a product (13.6% of 63,482 replies, estimated). That share is steady across categories, from 12.2% in email marketing to 17.5% in social media scheduling. Among the 42 subreddits with at least 30 questions and 200 replies, the most seller-heavy was r/SocialMediaMarketing (19.9%) and the least was r/SEO (11.2%). No big subreddit reaches 1 in 5.

This counts only sellers who say so ("I built", "I'm the founder", "disclaimer: I work at"). A seller who hides it reads as a happy customer, so the real share is higher. How the share is estimated is in the Method.

The bigger seller signal is in the posts. Pitches are 51% of analytics posts, 39% of project management posts and 38% of workflow automation posts. HR and payroll is the opposite: 466 questions against 60 pitches, about 8 buyers for every seller. The same split for "alternative to X" posts is in Askers vs sellers of alternatives.

What to do with this if you market B2B software

• Find your category's home first. CRM and social media scheduling questions sit in a handful of subreddits (table). For website builders and CMS, SEO tools, email marketing, project management, help desk and live chat, or web and product analytics, the buyers are in the subreddits of their own job, so look for those.
• Be early or skip it. Half of all first replies land within 32 minutes. A reply the next day sits under a thread that has already moved on. For when a subreddit is awake, see when to post.
• Crowded categories need a different angle. In analytics, project management and automation, every question already draws pitches. A plain comparison from someone who uses several tools stands out more than another "I built".
• Quiet categories are open. Four categories have four to eight questions per pitch: website builders and CMS, accounting and invoicing, email marketing, and HR and payroll. 18.1% of email marketing questions got no reply at all.
• Read the rules before you answer. r/sales bans recommendations from anyone who works for the product. r/SaaS allows one mention or three links every 60 days, with the affiliation stated.

To find the subreddits for your own category, Find Subs ranks subreddits by how close they are to one you name, so you can start from r/CRMSoftware or r/smallbusiness and see where else the same people post.

Method

• Posts: every Reddit post title from October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026 that names one of 12 software categories (a category word or a well-known product, such as "CRM", "HubSpot", "payroll", "Zapier") and a buying phrase ("recommend", "best", "alternative", "what do you use", "vs", "worth it", "anyone tried"). Not removed, not NSFW, no known bots, no profile pages. That gave 16,333 titles.
• Labels: an AI model (Claude Haiku) read each title and chose asking, pitching or other, plus the category. Two runs, independent, same instructions. They agreed on 14,400 titles (88.2%). For the other 1,933, a larger model (Claude Sonnet) read the title and decided. Result: 7,416 asking, 2,751 pitching, 6,166 other. Every label is in the CSV, with Reddit post IDs to check any of them.
• Blind check: Claude Sonnet labeled a random 300 titles without seeing any other label. It matched the final label on 280 (93.3%), and of the 130 titles labeled asking in that sample, it also called 123 asking (94.6%).
• Replies: comments by anyone other than the poster, not bots, not pinned, not from moderators. Reply speed and "no reply" use only posts with at least 7 days of comments before September 30, 2026.
• Sellers: a word list marks a reply as from a seller ("I built", "we built", "I'm the founder", "my tool", "our platform", "I work at", "disclaimer"). Two AI judges and an arbiter checked 300 random replies. Of 150 the list marked, 95 were sellers (63%); of 150 it did not mark, 15 were (10%). The share shown corrects for both: marked share × 0.63 + unmarked share × 0.10.

Limits

• Titles only. A question that only shows up in the body ("Need help with our stack") is not counted, so these are lower bounds.
• 12 categories is not all software. Developer tools, design tools and AI writing tools are left out.
• Removed posts are left out. Moderators remove pitches more often than questions, so the real share of pitches is higher than shown.
• Sellers who don't say so are counted as buyers.
• English titles only, in practice: the buying phrases are English.

The data

The counts and every label behind this article are in these files. They're free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; please credit KissMyPost and link to this page.

• CSVBy category, all 12Questions, pitches, subreddits, share in the top five subreddits, reply speed, share with no reply and estimated share of replies from sellers, per category.
• CSVBy subreddit and categoryThe same reply measures for every subreddit with at least 3 questions in a category.
• CSVEvery label, 16,333 postsOne row per post: Reddit ID, month, subreddit, both AI labels, the arbiter's label where there was one, the final label and category. No titles and no account names.
• PNGChart, 1600 × 1100Buyer questions vs pitches by category, as an image.

Questions people ask

This study uses the same data as KissMyPost, a Reddit analytics tool. It shows which subreddits your buyers use, what kind of posts do well there and when, and lets you search posts back to 2005.