EnsembleData sells social media data through an API. It's the established option in this category — the one newer entrants position themselves against.
It's also the strangest thing I found while measuring this market: it has no accessible sitemap. No blog machine, no comparison pages, no tutorial matrix. Competitors with a fraction of its price have thousands of pages; this one appears to do no content marketing whatsoever, and charges the most.
That reordered how I think about entering this market, so it's worth explaining.
What it costs
Monthly subscription with a daily unit allowance.
| Plan | Price/month | Units/day |
|---|---|---|
| Wood | $100 | 1,500 |
| Bronze | $200 | 5,000 |
| Silver | $400 | 11,000 |
| Gold | $800 | 25,000 |
| Platinum | $1,400 | 50,000 |
Units vary by endpoint. Roughly: a TikTok profile is 1 unit; Instagram User Info is 3; Instagram detailed info is 10. User Posts returns 10 posts for 1 unit; Post Comments returns 30 comments for 1 unit; a Followers List returns 100 for 2 units.
⚠️ The daily reset, and the arithmetic nobody shows you
Unused units reset at midnight UTC. They don't roll over.
Do the math on the entry plan:
| How you use it | Units bought | Units used | Real cost per unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every day, fully | 45,000/mo | 45,000 | $0.0022 |
| 10 days a month | 45,000/mo | 15,000 | $0.0067 |
| 3 days a month | 45,000/mo | 4,500 | $0.022 |
Same $100. Ten times the unit cost, purely because your usage is bursty.
That is the entire pitch of the prepaid-credit competitors. When SocialCrawl and ScrapeCreators say "credits never expire," this is the specific pain they're naming.
If your workload is steady, the daily model is fine and the headline price is honest. If you scrape in bursts — a weekly report, a client project, a research run — you are paying for capacity you throw away every night.
Who it's for
Good fit if you have predictable daily volume, you want a vendor that's been around, and a monthly invoice is easier for your accounting than topping up credits.
Good fit if $100/month is noise in your budget and you'd rather not think about it.
Bad fit for bursty usage. See the table above.
Bad fit if you want to try before committing — though there is a free trial at 50 units/day, the first paid step is $100/month, against free tiers of 100 credits (SocialCrawl) or $5 of compute (Apify).
Where competitors are better
| Better at | |
|---|---|
| SocialCrawl | No subscription, credits never expire, free tier without a card. Broader declared coverage and a real MCP story |
| ScrapeCreators | Cheaper at volume (~$0.99 per 1,000 at the top pack), no rate limit, free cache, and vastly more documentation |
Specialists (twitterapi.io, socialdata.tools) |
If you only need X, ~$0.18–0.20 per 1,000 profiles beats every generalist |
| Phyllo | Official APIs with creator consent — the low-legal-risk route |
Where EnsembleData is better, and it matters
It has been around. In a category where half the vendors launched in the last eighteen months and one of them (Proxycurl) was sued into closing, "still here next year" is a real feature.
It doesn't need you to find it through a blog post. A vendor whose revenue doesn't depend on SEO is a vendor whose incentives aren't tangled with content marketing. That cuts both ways, but it's not nothing.
The thing I actually learned from them
I spent a week assuming content was the way into this market. Then I measured eleven sitemaps and found the most expensive, most established vendor doing none of it.
There are at least two paths here, and the loud one isn't necessarily the winning one. I wrote up the full measurement here.
The legal part
Same as every scraping vendor: it violates platform Terms of Service — civil exposure, not criminal. Meta v. Bright Data (2024) held that logged-off scraping of public data isn't bound by those terms.
Public data is still personal data under GDPR and LGPD. If you store what comes back, you become the controller. That's your exposure regardless of which vendor you pick.
Prices and the 00:00 UTC reset read from ensembledata.com/pricing on 5 September 2026 — primary source, confirmed word for word. The sitemap absence I measured directly the same day. Verify before deciding.