# SocialFetch vs SocialCrawl

Two normalized-schema social scraping APIs compared: platform breadth against operational transparency.

Checked August 2026. Public pricing pages. No affiliate links.

SocialFetch and SocialCrawl are the newer generation of social scraping APIs: both promise one normalized schema across platforms instead of raw per-platform payloads. SocialCrawl bets on breadth: 48 platforms including e-commerce and review sites. SocialFetch bets on operational trust: published uptime, failure-refund rules, and monitoring webhooks. Both are young vendors; test before you commit either way.

## At a glance

| Criteria | SocialFetch | SocialCrawl | Openhandle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 100 credits, no card. Then prepaid packs | 100 credits once, no card. Then prepaid packs | 100 free requests, no card |
| Pricing | $14/1k on the starter pack. ~$1.88/1k at $47, ~$1.64/1k only at $379 | £15 for 2,500 (~£6/1k). £299 buys 50k-150k, depending on your mix. Billed in GBP | $3 per 1k, down to $1.50 per 1k at volume. 30-day cache hits are free |
| Credit mechanics | Prepaid packs never expire. Subscription saves 8%, but those credits reset monthly | Prepaid, paid up front. Credits never expire | Pay after use. No credits, no subscription |
| Credits per call | 1 per lookup. Infrastructure failures free | 1 standard, 5-10 advanced, 20 universal search. Vendor says ~3.1 average | No credits. One answer, one request |
| Platform depth | Depth per platform not published, about 8 endpoints per platform on average. 21 platforms | 21 TikTok and 33 Instagram endpoints, about 8 per platform across 48 platforms, mostly shopping and search sites | 45 Instagram, 28 TikTok, and 17 X endpoints. More platforms and data added by demand |
| Schema | Normalized across platforms | Normalized across platforms | One schema across Instagram, TikTok, and X |
| Reliability signals | 99.8% uptime over 90 days. Live fetch averages ~3.2s. Request IDs | Built-in retries. No uptime figure published | 99.9% uptime |
| Extras | Monitors with signed webhooks, MCP server, TypeScript SDK, n8n and Make | Universal search at 20 credits, sentiment scores, MCP integration | REST, OpenAPI, MCP server, SDKs for TypeScript, Python, and Go |

Figures from public pages, August 2026. Note the currencies differ.

## Pricing mechanics

Headline rates are close at mid-volume, but the metering differs in ways that dominate the bill:

- SocialFetch charges one credit per lookup across endpoints. Its small $14/1,000 starter pack is expensive per call; the realistic rates start at the $47 pack.
- SocialCrawl's standard calls are one credit, but advanced endpoints cost 5-10 and universal search costs 20; the vendor's own stated mixed average is ~3.1 credits per call. Multiply your endpoint mix before trusting the per-1k headline.

Both refuse to expire credits. SocialFetch additionally publishes a refund rule: infrastructure failures are not billed, while definitive not-found answers are.

## Coverage vs operations

SocialCrawl's 48 platforms reach past social into Amazon, eBay, Walmart, search engines, and review sites, closer to a general public-web data API. If your product needs social plus commerce signals from one vendor, that breadth is the differentiator, along with cross-platform search and sentiment scoring.

SocialFetch is social-only but more explicit operationally: a published 90-day uptime number, average latency, per-response request IDs, and change monitoring with signed webhooks, the plumbing you otherwise build yourself.

Both are small vendors without SOC 2 or published SLAs. Whichever you pick, run your own success-rate test on the endpoints you need.

## Verdicts

- **Social plus e-commerce or review data in one key.** SocialCrawl.
- **Production social pipelines where you want failure semantics and monitoring built in.** SocialFetch.
- **Search-heavy workloads.** price SocialCrawl's 20-credit search calls explicitly; that is the line item that surprises.
- **Either way.** both offer 100 free credits, so run the same test suite against both in an afternoon.

## How we checked

Claims come from socialfetch.dev and socialcrawl.dev public pages, read in August 2026. Vendors change pricing; check their pages before deciding. Tell us about an error and we will correct it.