The cheapest social media data APIs, ranked
Posts are published in English only. The rest of the site reads in ten languages; these do not, because a translated archive is one nobody keeps current.
The advertised rate is one of three numbers that decide what you pay. The other two are the floor you owe before your first call, and what happens to your bill when a call comes back empty. Rank on the advertised rate and you get one order. Rank on what a real workload costs and you get a different one.
The advertised rates
| Provider | Per 1,000 results | Paid before your first call |
|---|---|---|
| SocialHolmes | $0.50 | None |
| HikerAPI | $1.00 | None |
| Apify | $1.50 | None |
| Bright Data | $1.50 | $499.00 |
| EnsembleData | $2.00 | $100.00 |
Other providers' figures are their own published rates as at August 28, 2026, normalised to dollars per thousand results. They change often — check before you rely on them, and tell us if one is wrong.
Where everybody starts. Each figure is that provider's own published rate normalised to dollars per thousand results, with the date it was checked.
Three adjustments that reorder the list
- Add the floor
- Divide any monthly minimum by your monthly volume and add it to the rate. At a million results this changes nothing. At fifty thousand it can dominate — a floor in the hundreds is several dollars per thousand on its own, before a single result is counted.
- Divide by fill rate
- Only if you are billed per request. A list where 70% of targets resolve makes a per-request rate 43% higher in real terms than it looks. Nobody publishes fill rate, which is the honest reason no ranking here is definitive.
- Price your own endpoint mix
- Where credits buy different amounts on different endpoints, the headline credit rate is close to meaningless. Take the endpoints you will really call, in the proportions you will really call them, and work out the credits. Twenty minutes.
Where that leaves the ranking
High volume, paged endpoints, clean targets: the advertised rates are roughly the right order, and floors amortise away. Everybody else — evaluating, prototyping, seasonal work, or lists with a dead fraction — providers with no floor and per-result billing win by more than the table suggests, and the gap widens the smaller and messier the workload. We are in the first group's answer and firmly in the second's, which is worth saying plainly rather than claiming to win everywhere.
What we charge
A provider that is 20% cheaper and returns 15% less is not cheaper. Run a hundred real targets through the two or three that survive your arithmetic, and compare completeness alongside cost.
Questions people ask
Which social media data API is cheapest?
Do the same rates apply to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube?
How do I compare providers that price in credits?
What is a good fill rate?
Try it on your own targets
The only comparison that settles anything is your own. A new account gets 1,000 credits, needs no card, and runs on the same endpoints and rate as a paying one.