If your product touches social networks—analytics, creator tools, brand safety, research—you have probably watched “fetch public posts” turn into a permanent science project. New edge cases every week. JSON that changes shape when you blink. PagerDuty at 2 a.m. because a selector moved.

We are building Social Fetch because that work belongs in an API layer, not in your roadmap forever.

The boring manifesto

“Exciting” social integrations are a trap. What you want is boring: stable field names, documented errors, keys you can rotate, and metering that matches how you ship.

Three bets we are making

1. Product teams outrank scraper cosplay. You are shipping features, not maintaining headless browsers for fun.
2. Unified beats one-off. One integration path beats N slightly different provider hacks—especially when you add a platform.
3. Support is part of the API. If we cannot debug it with a request ID, we did not finish the job.

The best social data pipeline is the one your future self does not recognize in the git blame.

Smoke test without drama

Before you touch metered routes, hit GET /v1/whoami. It validates your key and does not charge credits—same idea as our Quickstart.

curl -sS -H "x-api-key: $SOCIALFETCH_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.socialfetch.dev/v1/whoami"

Here is the same idea in TypeScript—note the x-api-key header (not a browser token, not a Bearer shortcut):

const origin =
	process.env.SOCIALFETCH_API_ORIGIN ?? "https://api.socialfetch.dev";

const res = await fetch(`${origin}/v1/whoami`, {
	headers: {
		"x-api-key": process.env.SOCIALFETCH_API_KEY ?? "",
	},
});

if (!res.ok) {
	const err = await res.json().catch(() => ({}));
	throw new Error(
		`whoami failed: ${res.status} ${JSON.stringify(err)}`,
	);
}

const body = await res.json();
console.log(body.meta?.requestId, body.data);

What to look for in the envelope

Successful bodies wrap payloads with meta (think requestId, creditsCharged, version info). Errors follow the same pattern so you are never guessing what to paste into a support ticket.

• meta.requestId — bring it when something looks wrong.
• Typed error bodies — see Errors for shapes and retry hints.
• Credits — metered routes line up with Credits and Pricing.

When scraping still wins

Sometimes a bespoke scraper is the right tool—one weird page, a proof of concept, a fire drill. We are not religious about it.

If you want the deep reference, the generated API reference is the map. For a gentler on-ramp, start with Quickstart.

Where to go next

You have three sensible moves—pick based on what you are holding in your head right now:

• Estimate cost before you promise a customer date → Pricing
• Wire auth and errors before you parallelize fetches → Quickstart, Errors
• Skim the surface area before you design your data model → API reference

Links and pricing

If you want a neutral read on fetch itself—timeouts, aborting, the mental model—Mozilla’s guide is still the standard: MDN: Using the Fetch API.

That is the stack we want you on: boring plumbing, interesting product.