Blog
Notes from building a social data API
We publish here when we ship an endpoint, change how billing or errors work, or learn something expensive in production. Expect short essays on response envelopes, founder post-mortems with real numbers, and curl-first writeups when a feature is easier to show than summarize.
Latest
22 articles. RSS
Engineering
Effect in production at Social Fetch
How Social Fetch uses Effect's typed errors, Schema validation, Schedule retries, and bounded concurrency to tame a dozen unreliable platform APIs.
Luke AskewEngineering
Web scraping API: markdown & HTML for LLMs
Pass a public URL and get markdown, HTML, or a grounded answer back. One Social Fetch key — one credit per completed lookup.
Social Fetch
Engineering
Free TikTok and YouTube transcript tools
Social Fetch
Lists
Best social media scraping APIs in 2026 — compared
Luke AskewLists
Best Hacker News APIs & scrapers in 2026
Luke AskewLists
Best Facebook Data APIs (2026)
Luke AskewLists
Best Instagram scrapers & data APIs in 2026
Luke AskewLists
Best LinkedIn APIs in 2026: partner vs public
Luke AskewLists
Best Reddit APIs in 2026: official vs REST
Luke AskewLists
Best TikTok scrapers & data APIs in 2026
Luke AskewLists
Best YouTube Transcript & Data APIs (2026)
Luke AskewLists
Best Twitter API alternatives in 2026
Luke AskewLists
Best Truth Social APIs & scrapers in 2026
Luke AskewCompare
Pinterest API pricing in 2026 (what you pay)
Luke Askew
About the blog
This is not a content calendar. We do not publish on a schedule, and we are not trying to rank for "what is an API." Most posts start as something we had to explain twice in support or a week we wish had ended differently — like the LinkedIn scraper jobs that ran for hours without failing and billed before anyone noticed.
If you are evaluating Social Fetch, start with the reliability post-mortem. If you are integrating, read the envelope and TypeScript SDK posts. Shopping a single network? Use the platform listicles for pricing and coverage side-by-side. Tutorials with runnable code live on the guides index; vendor comparisons live under /compare.
Authors are named on each card. When you email support about something you read, mention the post title — we can usually connect it to the week we wrote it and the endpoint version it references.
Questions about a post? Email support with the requestId from your API response — we can usually trace the thread back to the week we wrote it.