Free Social Media Scraping API: What Free Tiers Include

Published October 25, 2026 · Competitor figures verified October 22, 2026 · Scrape Everything team

TL;DR: No free social media scraping API is unlimited. Every provider we checked caps its free tier as one-time credits, a daily or monthly allowance, or a time-boxed trial. Scrape Everything gives 100 free credits on signup with no payment details (100 lookups on 1-credit endpoints like Instagram or TikTok profiles), plus 1,000 more for a disclosed G2 review.

So the real question is which free tier fits your test, and how far it gets you before the first bill.

Is there a free social media scraping API?#

Yes, as long as "free" means "free up to a cap". A free social media scraping API is a hosted API that returns public data from platforms like Instagram, TikTok or YouTube as JSON, with an allowance you can spend before paying.

The caps come in four shapes:

• One-time credits: a fixed number at signup, gone once spent. ScrapeCreators, SociaVault and Scrape Everything work this way.
• Daily units: a small allowance that resets every day. EnsembleData does this.
• Monthly allowance: Apify gives $5 of platform usage a month, Bright Data 5,000 records a month.
• Time-boxed trial: full access for a set number of days. Data365 does this.

A free plan refills. A free trial doesn't. EnsembleData's 50 units a day add up to about 1,500 over a month, but you can never spend more than 50 on a given day, so a 300-profile burst on day one won't happen. One-time credits are the opposite: spend them all in an afternoon if you like, but they don't come back.

How do the free tiers compare?#

These are the free tiers each provider documents on its own pricing page (verified October 22, 2026). Free tiers change, so check the linked page before you plan around a number.

Product names are trademarks of their owners; we are not affiliated with them. Figures from each vendor's public pricing page, verified October 22, 2026. Spot an error? Email [email protected] and we correct it.

The units aren't comparable one to one. Apify's $5 is platform usage, and every social media scraper in its store is an Actor with its own price, so what $5 buys depends on the Actor you pick (we went through that model in Apify alternatives for social media scraping). Bright Data's 5,000 records a month is a recurring allowance, and if you already work in their ecosystem it's a real one.

Coverage matters more than the free number, though. ScrapeCreators and EnsembleData list platforms we don't cover, including Reddit and Threads, and SociaVault lists more than 25 platforms and services. If you need one of those, test their free tier, not ours. Social Fetch and SocialCrawl also show up for this search; we haven't verified their terms, so they're not in the table.

For the paid side, see social media scraping API pricing compared, or our side-by-side pages at /compare.

Which free option should you pick?

What can you do with 100 free credits?#

100 credits is 100 successful calls on 1-credit endpoints. Most of our endpoints cost 1 credit; some feed and search endpoints cost 2 or 3.

The credits work on all 9 platforms we cover: Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Facebook, Telegram, Spotify, Pinterest and Twitch. Not LinkedIn, Reddit, Threads or Snapchat. Public data only, no logins, no private accounts.

Free credits behave exactly like paid ones: same endpoints, same response format. You can create a free account and run the examples below in a couple of minutes.

How do I make my first free request?

1. Sign in with Google or GitHub at /login. You get 100 credits and nobody asks for payment details.
2. Copy your API key from the dashboard. It starts with ssk_live_.
3. Export it as SCRAPEEVERYTHING_API_KEY.
4. Send a POST with a JSON body to https://api.scrapeeverything.com/v1/<platform>/<action>.

Here's the Instagram profile endpoint with cURL:

curl -X POST https://api.scrapeeverything.com/v1/instagram/profile \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCRAPEEVERYTHING_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"username": "example_user"}'

Trimmed response, with placeholder values. The meta block tells you what the call cost and what's left:

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "id": "1234567890",
    "username": "example_user",
    "full_name": "Example User",
    "biography": "Coffee, cameras, Lisbon.",
    "is_private": false,
    "is_verified": false,
    "is_business_account": true,
    "follower_count": 48200,
    "following_count": 310,
    "post_count": 712
  },
  "meta": {
    "request_id": "req_...",
    "cached": false,
    "credits_charged": 1,
    "credits_remaining": 99
  }
}

And a YouTube transcript in Python, with cache_days set so re-running the script on the same video costs nothing:

import os
import requests

resp = requests.post(
    "https://api.scrapeeverything.com/v1/youtube/transcript",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['SCRAPEEVERYTHING_API_KEY']}"},
    json={"id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ", "lang": "en", "cache_days": 14},
    timeout=90,
)
body = resp.json()
if not body["success"]:
    raise SystemExit(f"{body['code']}: {body['message']}")

t = body["data"]
print(t["language_name"], t["segment_count"], "segments")
print(t["text"][:200])
print("credits left:", body["meta"]["credits_remaining"])

Trimmed response shape (placeholder values):

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "video_id": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "language": "en",
    "language_name": "English",
    "is_auto_generated": false,
    "available_languages": [
      { "code": "en", "name": "English", "is_auto_generated": false }
    ],
    "segment_count": 61,
    "text": "...",
    "segments": [
      { "start": 18.64, "duration": 3.24, "text": "..." }
    ]
  },
  "meta": { "cached": false, "credits_charged": 1, "credits_remaining": 98 }
}

The TikTok equivalents are tiktok.profile and tiktok.transcript (more on the second in our TikTok transcript API guide). Every endpoint, parameter and credit cost is on the scrapers hub.

Free accounts get 60 requests per minute and 5 concurrent requests. At that pace a loop burns through 100 credits in under two minutes, so the rate limit is never what stops a free test.

Can I use the free credits from an AI agent?

Yes. The same credits work through our MCP server (@scrapeeverything/mcp, in the official MCP Registry), the CLI (npx scrapeeverything) and the n8n node. Setup guides: MCP server for social media data and social media scraper CLI. The OpenAPI spec lists every endpoint if you'd rather generate a client.

Which free tools need no signup at all?#

For a handful of accounts you don't need a key. Our free tools run on the same endpoints with no signup:

• Instagram profile viewer: bio, follower, following and post counts.
• TikTok profile viewer: followers, following, total likes, video count and bio.
• YouTube transcript, TikTok transcript and YouTube channel viewer.

Each visitor gets a small daily allowance. Once you want JSON in a script, use the API credits.

What do the official free APIs give you?#

Some platforms have an official API you can use at no charge, and for the right job they beat any scraping API.

YouTube Data API v3

Free with a Google Cloud project and an API key. Google's quota cost table gives a default allocation of 100 search.list calls a day, plus 10,000 units a day shared by most other methods, where a videos.list or channels.list call costs 1 unit. If you already have the video IDs and only need statistics, we'd use the official API, no question. It falls short in two places. Search runs out first. And the official captions.download method generally only works on videos you can edit. The options are in YouTube Data API quota alternatives.

Twitch Helix

Free with an app's client ID and an access token, and it covers channels, videos and clips. Rate limits are in Twitch's API guide. For a Twitch-only project, start there.

Instagram, TikTok and X

Instagram's and TikTok's official APIs mostly serve accounts that connect through login and app review, not reads of arbitrary public profiles. We compare the two Instagram routes in Instagram Graph API vs scraper API. X's official API is paid for most read volumes; the numbers are in Twitter/X API alternative pricing.

Reddit and LinkedIn

We don't cover either. For Reddit, the official API (often used through the PRAW Python library) is the route to try first, within its rate limits and terms. For LinkedIn we don't know of a free official route to public profile data.

Our view: use the official API whenever it returns what you need and the quota holds. Reach for a scraping API for the data it won't return (heavy YouTube search, other people's transcripts, arbitrary Instagram and TikTok profiles) or when one JSON schema across nine platforms saves you writing nine clients.

What about free open-source scrapers?#

You can run tools like Instaloader (Instagram), yt-dlp (YouTube and many video sites) or the youtube-transcript-api Python package on your own machine for free. No credits, no account.

The cost moves elsewhere: you fix the code when a platform changes its pages, you handle blocks on your own IP, and at real volume you buy proxies. For a one-off pull from your laptop, open source is often the right call. For a scheduled job other people depend on, a hosted API is cheaper once you count the hours.

Is it legal to use a free scraping API on social media data?#

Free or paid, the legal picture is the same. We only return public data, no logins, no private accounts, but public profiles are still personal data under laws like the GDPR, so you need a lawful basis for what you store and how long you keep it. Platform terms of service are a separate question. We cover both in is scraping public social media data legal?. It's not legal advice, and for a commercial project you should ask a lawyer.

What happens after the free credits?#

Here is the math from free test to first bill, with our own prices. The workload: a 200-creator shortlist across Instagram and TikTok, refreshed weekly.

At about 4.3 weeks a month, that's roughly 3,440 credits a month. Re-runs inside the same week during development cost 0 if you send cache_days.

• 100 free credits cover the test and nothing else.
• With the G2 bonus (1,100 total), you get the test plus the first full 800-credit run, with about 200 left.
• Builder, $39 for 25,000 credits ($1.56 per 1,000), covers about seven months. Credits never expire, so a slow month or a paused shortlist doesn't waste anything, and the pack simply lasts longer.

Buying any pack also raises your limits from 60 to 300 requests per minute and from 5 to 20 concurrent. Check current packs on /pricing and run your own workload through the credit calculator.

One caveat that cuts against us. If this workload were only profile lookups and you already worked inside Bright Data, their 5,000 recurring records a month could cover it at no cost. Free is free.

How do you stretch free credits further?#

In development you'll re-run the same script dozens of times. That's where credits go.

1. Send cache_days (1 to 14) on any lookup that doesn't need live data. A repeat within that window costs 0 credits and meta.cached comes back true.
2. Don't retry definitive answers. Failed requests (platform blocks, timeouts, server errors) are refunded automatically, so retrying those costs nothing. A 404 such as "account does not exist" or NO_TRANSCRIPT is a completed lookup and is billed, and retrying it bills you again for the same answer.
3. Start with 1-credit endpoints. Read the field list first: a profile call often answers what you thought needed a 2-credit feed call.
4. Claim the G2 review bonus: 1,000 credits, once per account, any rating, as long as the review says you got credits for it. Details on the bonus page. We also send promo codes by email now and then.

FAQ#

Is there a completely free social media scraping API with no limits?

No. Every hosted provider we checked caps its free tier, because each call costs them infrastructure. Self-hosted open-source scrapers cost nothing to run but you pay in maintenance and blocked requests. Official APIs like the YouTube Data API are free within a daily quota.

Do I need a credit card for a free scraping API?

Not for ours. You sign in with Google or GitHub and get 100 credits with no payment details. ScrapeCreators, SociaVault, Apify and Bright Data also state on their pricing pages that no card is required for their free tiers (verified October 22, 2026).

Is there a free Instagram scraper API?

Yes, within limits. instagram.profile costs 1 credit, so 100 free credits buy 100 public profile lookups. For a few manual checks, the Instagram profile viewer needs no account.

Is there a free TikTok API for public profiles?

TikTok's official APIs center on logged-in users and approved apps. For public profile data, tiktok.profile costs 1 credit per call from your free credits, and the TikTok profile viewer is free with no signup.

Do free credits expire, and do failed requests use them up?

Credits never expire, free or paid. Fetch-side failures (blocks, timeouts, server errors) are refunded automatically. Definitive results such as "account not found" or "account is private" are billed, because the lookup completed.

What happens when my free credits run out?

Requests are rejected with 402 INSUFFICIENT_CREDITS before any work is done, so nothing is charged. Buy a one-time pack when you're ready; there's no subscription. Payment is in crypto.

Sign in with Google or GitHub, copy your ssk_live_ key, and run the cURL above on a profile you actually care about. That's 1 of your 100 credits. Get 100 free credits.