SocialCrawl sells one API that returns social media data from many platforms in a single response shape. You send an HTTP request, they scrape, you get JSON that looks the same whether it came from TikTok or LinkedIn.
The normalization is the actual product. Writing one parser instead of sixty-four is what you're paying for.
What it costs
Credits, prepaid, no subscription. In their words on 26 September 2026: "Pay per call, never per month. Credits never expire."
| Pack | Credits | Price | Their per-call figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 100 (once, no card) | £0 | — |
| Starter | 2,500 | £15 | £0.0112 |
| Growth | 20,000 | £49 | £0.0077 (marked "Most popular") |
| Pro | 150,000 | £299 | — |
| Enterprise | on request | — | — |
Re-checked at source on 26 September 2026: the packs and prices are unchanged since 5 September. The credit model is not new — it is what they sold then and what they sell now.
The part the headline price hides
"£0.0025 per call" only applies to the cheapest endpoints. There are four tiers, and the counts below come from their own OpenAPI spec — which disagrees with two of their documentation pages:
| Tier | Cost | Operations |
|---|---|---|
| standard | 1 credit | 319 |
| advanced | 5 credits | 203 |
| premium | 10 credits | 34 |
| utilities, monitors | 0 | 18 |
| total | 574 |
Their own pricing page put concrete numbers on this on 26 September 2026: a standard endpoint is 1 credit, a mixed workload averages 3.1 credits, and universal search costs 20. So the headline per-call figure describes the cheapest case, and a realistic routine runs roughly 3× it — 20× if you lean on search. Everyone in this market prices this way; it just makes headline comparisons useless.
One endpoint charges 60 credits and only bills if it returns a result. That's pricing by outcome with the risk on the seller, and it's the most interesting thing in their catalog.
What it covers
630 APIs across 67 platforms, as declared on their pricing page on 26 September 2026 — up from the 574 operations across 64 platforms I counted in their OpenAPI spec on 5 September. Both figures are kept: the first is what they advertise, the second is what I counted, and the two were taken three weeks apart.
Largest sets, from the 5 September spec: LinkedIn 44 · Instagram 37 · TikTok 33 · YouTube 29 · Facebook 24 · X 15.
⚠️ The platform count is padded with e-commerce. Sephora, Home Depot, Walmart, Target, Klarna and AliExpress were in the 64. They're real endpoints; they're not social networks. I have not re-audited the 67 for the same padding.
Three things I measured that they don't publish
Their sitemap has 452 URLs — 125 of them a Korean duplicate of the English site. Not the content leader people assume: ScrapeCreators has 2,581.
Cache is shared across all customers. The cache key is endpoint plus parameters, not your API key. A call someone else made inside the freshness window is free for you. Good for your bill; also means their TTLs are short (2–30 minutes for most things).
Monitors are recurring revenue in disguise. Creating one is free; each check bills the endpoint plus 1 credit. A 1-credit page checked hourly is ~1,440 credits/month. Worth knowing before you set one up casually.
Who it's for
Good fit if you need several platforms behind one schema, you'd rather not maintain scrapers, and you can live with prepaid credits.
Bad fit if you need one platform only — a specialist will be cheaper. twitterapi.io runs about $0.18 per 1,000 profiles for X alone.
Bad fit if you need guaranteed uptime. They publish latency figures and a live status endpoint, but no uptime percentage and no SLA. Nobody in this market does, and scrapers break weekly when platforms change.
Where they beat me, and it is not on price
Coverage, and it is not close. They declare 67 platforms; HonestHook collects 10. If the platform you need is in their list and not in mine, nothing about my pricing matters to you.
Ceiling. Their Pro pack is 150,000 credits in one purchase. My plan tops out at 5,000 credits for $9. Somebody running a six-figure monthly job is not my customer yet, and pretending otherwise would waste their time.
⚠️ Where they do not beat me is per credit, and it is worth being exact because the opposite is easy to assume from the bigger packs. At £1 = $1.36 (9 September 2026), Growth is $3.33 per 1,000 credits and Pro is $2.71; HonestHook is $1.80. The volume packs narrow the gap and do not close it. Their advantage is breadth and ceiling, not unit price.
Where competitors are better
| Better at | |
|---|---|
| ScrapeCreators | Longer track record, no rate limit, free cache, and far more documentation (2,581 pages vs 452) |
| EnsembleData | Maturity. Charges $100/month with a daily quota — worse economics if your usage is bursty, better if you want a vendor that's been around |
| Bright Data / Oxylabs | Enterprise scale and support. Also enterprise pricing |
| Phyllo | Plays the legal side: official APIs, data with creator consent. Slower and narrower, much lower risk |
The legal part nobody puts on the pricing page
Scraping these platforms violates their Terms of Service. That's civil exposure, not criminal — Meta v. Bright Data (2024) found that logged-off scraping of public data isn't bound by those terms, which helps.
But public data is still personal data under GDPR and LGPD. SocialCrawl's own documentation pushes that responsibility to you: if you store what comes back, you become the controller.
If you're in Brazil or the EU, that matters more than the price difference between vendors.
What I'd copy even if I never bought it
- Pricing by outcome — charge only when you deliver. It let them price one endpoint at 60× the standard rate without complaint.
- The agent distribution layer —
/llms.txt, public OpenAPI, a hosted MCP server, free discovery endpoints. When a developer asks Claude or Cursor how to do something, the agent reads whatever docs are best structured for machines. That's cheap to build and almost nobody has done it.
Who measured this
We did — and we're building in the same category, so read the above knowing that.
We kept it a straight review because a rigged comparison is worth nothing to you and everything to them. The two things above that I said were worth copying, I meant.
What we run today is an hourly archive of what's rising across public developer and social platforms — a different product from this one: it answers what gained traction, not what's trending now.
What we're building is our own collection layer: public pages, no login, no reseller in between. We publish what it costs us per thousand calls, which is the number nobody on this page publishes.
Read from socialcrawl.dev, their OpenAPI spec and their sitemap on 5 September 2026 — primary sources. Prices and counts drift; verify before deciding.