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. Credits don't expire.
| Pack | Credits | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 100 (once) | £0 |
| Starter | 2,500 | £15 |
| Growth | 20,000 | £49 |
| Pro | 150,000 | £299 |
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 |
A routine that uses trend feeds and transcripts costs 5–20× the advertised rate. 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
64 platforms, 574 operations. Largest sets: 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 are in that 64. They're real endpoints; they're not social networks.
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 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.
Read from socialcrawl.dev, their OpenAPI spec and their sitemap on 5 September 2026 — primary sources. Prices and counts drift; verify before deciding.