Blog
How this data actually behaves
We sell the data endpoints and buy the proxies under them; we do not sell proxies. That is an unusual position in this category and it is the only reason these posts are worth reading: we can publish the vendor that did not respond and the approach we tried and abandoned.
The undocumented web
14 postsWhat each platform hands a logged-out request, measured rather than assumed, with the date and the network position recorded next to every result.
How Do You Analyze YouTube Comments Without the API? Top Comments, Questions and Common Words
Read a video's first comments in YouTube's order and count likes, questions and repeated words, with no Data API quota. What that sample is, and is not.
7 min read · 19 Oct 2026
How Do You Check a TikTok Engagement Rate Without Logging In? Formula, Free Tools and Limits
Engagement rate is likes, comments and shares over views or followers, and the choice changes the answer. Worked on a real account, with what a logged-out visitor cannot see.
7 min read · 19 Oct 2026
What Can You See on Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat Without an Account? Profile Viewers Compared
What a logged-out visitor sees on a public Instagram, LinkedIn or Snapchat profile, what stays behind the login, and the real values three free viewers returned.
8 min read · 19 Oct 2026
How Do You Get a TikTok Video Transcript?
You can, when the video carries a caption track. TikTok generates captions with speech recognition, but no public TikTok API returns them to a commercial developer, so the transcript has to come off the public video.
8 min read · 16 Oct 2026
How Do You Read Public Facebook Page Posts?
The official Graph API path is gated behind App Review and business verification, CrowdTangle is gone, and its replacement is researchers-only. Here is what each route actually requires, and what a public, logged-out read can get.
9 min read · 16 Oct 2026
Can You Get Reddit Data Without the Official API?
Reddit's official API tightened sharply in 2023, but Reddit still serves its public listings in machine-readable form. Here is what is public, what the official API changed, and where engagement counts quietly go missing.
7 min read · 16 Oct 2026
What Can a LinkedIn Profile Viewer Actually See?
Two different things get called a "LinkedIn profile viewer" — browsing anonymously, and pulling public profile data. LinkedIn's own API returns only your own profile, and the law on reading the rest is more nuanced than "public data is fair game."
9 min read · 16 Oct 2026
Social Media APIs by Platform: What's Official, What It Costs, and What's Public Without a Key
Every major social platform has an official API, but most read only accounts that authorised you. Here is what each one gives you, what approval it needs, what it costs, and what a logged-out request still returns.
12 min read · 25 Sept 2026
How to View Tweets Without an X Account in 2026 (and What Replaced Nitter)
Open the post link in a private window; x.com shows a single post and a profile's latest few posts logged out. Nitter's repository is archived and XCancel is suspended, so here is what still works for readers and developers.
11 min read · 25 Sept 2026
Does Instagram Have a Public API? What the Official Endpoints Actually Return
Instagram's official APIs read accounts that authorised your app. There is no endpoint for an arbitrary public profile, and Basic Display was switched off on 4 December 2024.
11 min read · 12 Sept 2026
Is There a Threads API for Public Posts? keyword_search, App Review and Limits
Yes, but gated twice: until App Review, keyword_search returns only four Meta accounts. What approval unlocks, the daily limits, and what results leave out.
10 min read · 12 Sept 2026
200 OK, Zero Bytes: How Platforms Say No Without Telling You
The most effective bot detection does not return 403. It returns a successful response with nothing in it, and lets you conclude the data was never there.
10 min read · 20 Aug 2026
Minting YouTube PO Tokens in Node: Fixing 0-Byte Caption Responses
YouTube caption URLs answer HTTP 200 with an empty body. Here is why, and the working Node recipe, including the three details nobody wrote down.
14 min read · 20 Aug 2026
YouTube Without an API Key: RSS, oEmbed, timedtext, and the Endpoints Google Doesn't Document
The channel feed carries view and like counts nobody mentions, handle-to-channel-ID has four fixes, and captions return zero bytes. Measured 2026-08-20.
10 min read · 20 Aug 2026
Legal and risk
5 postsWhat the courts actually held, as opposed to the single sentence everyone quotes from each case, including the parts that went against the scraper. None of it is legal advice, and every post says so on its face.
Ad Libraries Are the Only Social Data a Regulator Made Public
Every other public dataset on a platform is public by permission, and permission can be withdrawn. Ad transparency archives exist because the law requires them.
11 min read · 20 Aug 2026
Is Web Scraping Legal? What hiQ and Meta v. Bright Data Actually Held
The two cases everyone cites, read properly, including the parts that went against the scraper and the three questions people keep merging.
10 min read · 20 Aug 2026
Logged Out Is Doing All the Work: The Distinction That Decides Your Scraping Exposure
Every load-bearing step in the Bright Data ruling depends on nobody being logged in. What that means for your contract risk, and for your architecture.
9 min read · 20 Aug 2026
Scraping and GDPR: \"Not a ToS Breach\" Is Not a Lawful Basis
US scraping wins are about contracts and the CFAA. Neither is about personal data. What EU law actually requires, and what to demand from a data vendor.
10 min read · 20 Aug 2026
Rate Limit, Ban, Letter, Lawsuit: What Actually Happens When a Platform Notices You
The escalation ladder from a 429 to litigation, rung by rung: what is documented, what is folklore, and the profile of who actually gets sued.
9 min read · 20 Aug 2026
What scraping actually costs
4 postsWritten from the buying side. We have no proxy to sell, which is why these can name the vendor whose endpoint did not respond and the tier that cannot run the workload it is sold for.
Four Ways to Price a Scraping API, and the Workload Each One Is Right For
Daily allowances, never-expiring credits, pay-for-success, and change-based billing are four different products. Which one wins depends on the shape of your month.
13 min read · 13 Sept 2026
Do Scraping APIs Charge You for Failed Requests?
Most vendors promise they only bill successes. Each one defines success differently, and on several of them a 403 block is billable. The published wording, compared.
11 min read · 12 Sept 2026
What a Residential Proxy Actually Is, and When You Don't Need One
Residential IPs cost 10-30x datacenter IPs, and plenty of workloads need none at all. Here is the mechanism, and how to tell which case you are in.
11 min read · 20 Aug 2026
The Credit-Multiplier Trap: Why a 1M-Credit Scraping Plan Is 100,000 Requests
Scraper APIs bill in credits and charge 10x for residential IPs, the exact IPs Instagram needs. Here is the arithmetic, with named vendors.
8 min read · 20 Aug 2026
Ad transparency data
2 postsThe one corner of this category that regulators made public on purpose, which changes both what you can build on it and how much risk comes with doing so.
Why Facebook Ad Library Scrapers Keep Breaking (and the Official API Doesn't)
The Ad Library UI is a private contract between Meta's frontend and its backend. The Graph API is a public one with a deprecation policy. That is the whole difference.
11 min read · 20 Aug 2026
The Meta Ad Library API, Field by Field
Every field, which ads populate it, the token path that blocks most people, and the security detail in ad_snapshot_url that will leak your access token.
12 min read · 20 Aug 2026
Built for machines
2 postsChange detection, schema drift, silent failures, and the billing consequences of each: the problems that appear once something else is consuming your pipeline on a schedule.
Polling Is a Tax: Change Detection for Platform Data
If 97% of your hourly re-fetches return the same bytes, you are paying for 7 million requests a month that told you nothing. Three ways to detect change, and the one lever that actually cuts the bill.
12 min read · 13 Sept 2026
What Breaks When a Platform Changes Its JSON Shape
The dangerous schema drift is not the field that disappears: your parser throws and you find out. It is the one that quietly changes meaning.
11 min read · 20 Aug 2026
What you will not find here
No “how to scrape X with Y” tutorials. The largest competitor in this category published 2,146 of them and they return roughly three visits a month between them, so the format is not a gap in our coverage. It is a decision.
No post is structured around us, and none of the comparisons scores itself. Where a competitor does something better, the post says which thing and why.
Where the measurements come from
Every probe result carries the date it was taken and the network position it was taken from. That second half matters more than it sounds: a request that succeeds from a home connection tells you very little about the same request from a datacenter range, which is where production runs.