What is a social media scraper API?
A social media scraper API is a hosted HTTP service that fetches public social pages or feeds, parses them, and returns JSON. You pay per request (or per job) instead of running headless browsers, proxies, and parsers in your own fleet.
Vs DIY scraping
DIY means you own proxies, fingerprint rotation, HTML breakages, and on-call when a CSS selector dies at 2am. A scraper API (or a public-data API that maintains scrapers behind REST) sells that ops work as a product.
Tradeoff: you depend on the vendor's uptime and schema. Pick vendors that document outcomes (found / not_found / private) and give you a request ID when something fails.
Vs official platform APIs
Official APIs require partner access and usually cover accounts you control. Scraper-style APIs target public content at scale for research, enrichment, and product features.
Compliance still matters. Public data does not mean "anything goes", respect platform terms, privacy law, and your own use case.
How Social Fetch fits
Social Fetch is a first-party REST API for public social data. We maintain the fetch path; you call documented routes across 17 platforms (137 ops) with one key and one { data, meta } envelope.
Compare alternatives under /compare if you are weighing scraper runtimes (Apify) vs vertical social REST. Free tools under /tools let you see a public profile or transcript before you buy credits.
FAQ
Is Social Fetch a scraper API?
We describe it as a public social data API. Under the hood we maintain live fetch paths so you do not operate browsers. The contract you integrate is REST + OpenAPI, not a job queue.
Why not just use Apify Actors?
Actors are flexible for custom crawls. If you need a stable profile GET inside a request thread with credits and requestId, a first-party social REST API is usually simpler. See /compare/apify.
Do empty or private results still cost credits?
On Social Fetch, completed lookup attempts that return documented lookupStatus outcomes still meter. See /docs/credits and /glossary/lookup-status.
Where can I try without an integration?
Use free tools under /tools, or Ask at /ask. Production paths are under /platforms and /docs/api.