Does ScraperAPI work on Facebook at all?
Some public Facebook pages, if you're willing to parse HTML yourself. For Instagram and Twitter the Proxyway Oct 2025 benchmark shows 0% — those platforms have defences that proxies alone don't get past.
SocialAPIs vs ScraperAPI
Great for e-commerce. Wrong tool for social.
Pricing verified June 2026. All claims linked to a source at the bottom of the page.
What ScraperAPI actually is
ScraperAPI is a general-purpose scraper. Send a URL, it handles proxy rotation, CAPTCHA, and JS rendering, then returns the raw HTML page. It's not a social API — there's no parser.
Pricing reality
ScraperAPI pricing looks simple — until credit multipliers and monthly expiry kick in.
- Plans: Hobby $49 / mo (100K credits), Startup $149 / mo (1M), Business $299 / mo (3M). Credits expire monthly.
- Base rate is 1 credit per request. Multipliers stack: LinkedIn = 30 credits, JS rendering +10, premium proxies +10–30. An ultra-premium rendered request can hit 75 credits — meaning $49 Hobby covers ~1,333 of those, not 100,000.
Does it work on social? Proxyway's October 2025 independent benchmark: 0% success on Instagram and Twitter/X. ~63.7% overall, propped up by e-commerce sites like Amazon and Zillow.
Where the complexity bites
- •No structured social output — you build and maintain the parser, and re-fix it every time a platform changes its markup.
- •Credit multipliers make the headline price misleading on anything harder than a static page.
- •0% Instagram and Twitter success means proxies alone don't solve the harder social platforms.
“ScraperAPI is a fine proxy layer for Amazon and Zillow. For social it hands you raw HTML and benchmarked 0% on Instagram and Twitter. We return structured social JSON from dedicated endpoints — not a proxy you bolt a parser onto.”
SocialAPIs vs ScraperAPI — side by side
| SocialAPIs | ScraperAPI | |
|---|---|---|
| Output | Structured JSON, consistent schema | Raw HTML — you parse it |
| Pricing model | Flat per request | Credits with stacking multipliers |
| Effective rate (social-grade) | ~$1.49 / 1,000 requests | ~$36 / 1,000 effective requests (75-credit reqs on Hobby) |
| Instagram / Twitter reliability | Roadmap | 0% (Proxyway Oct 2025) |
| Parser maintenance | On us | On you |
Effective price math
ScraperAPI's $49 Hobby plan reads as 100,000 requests. On JS-rendered + premium-proxy social targets at 75 credits each, that's ~1,333 effective requests — about $36 per 1,000. And you still have to parse the HTML.
Frequently asked
What about JS rendering?
It helps for client-side hydrated sites. For social platforms the bigger problem is detection and rate limiting, which JS rendering doesn't fix — and it triples the credit cost per request.
When should I use ScraperAPI instead?
When you're scraping non-social pages — Amazon, Zillow, generic SERPs. Their success rate on those verticals is high.
Verify everything we said
All competitor pricing was checked against the live pages in June 2026. Pricing changes often — re-verify before making a buy decision based on these numbers.
See it for yourself
200 free calls / month. No credit card. The same engineering behind 7.2M+ monthly calls — one curl away.