Social media decision
Social Fetch
A narrow, small-scale scraper + normalized API for a few platforms is feasible to build and run, but matching Social Fetch's 21-platform coverage, reliability, and scraper upkeep is operationally heavy and costly—so paying is reasonable for full production needs.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Social Fetch alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Call heterogeneous platform endpoints, normalize responses into {data,meta}, and bill/consume credits per lookup.
What it still won’t have
- Coverage and maintenance for 21 platforms and 165 endpoints
- Engineered reliability (99.8% uptime, hosted throttle handling, and incident tracing)
- Monitors with signed webhooks and monitor scaling
- A maintained scraper fleet (DOM-shift fixes, proxy handling, and paid-route accounting)
What remains hard
- Execution quality
99.8% uptime · #3 Product of the Day · 3,200+ developers
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 8 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal hosted Social Fetch replacement in Node.js (Express) + PostgreSQL + Puppeteer (or Playwright) + a paid residential proxy provider. In scope: (1) an API key protected REST endpoint GET /v1/{platform}/profiles/{handle} that performs a live fetch for X, YouTube, and Reddit; (2) normalize responses into {data, meta} with meta.requestId and meta.creditsCharged; (3) implement simple per-call credit accounting (configurable credits-per-route), logging of raw responses, and a /v1/balance and /v1/whoami free route; (4) basic monitor job scheduler that polls a profile and emits signed webhook on diff; (5) retries, proxy rotation, and clear error codes (lookup_failed, not_found, temporarily_unavailable); (6) tests for normalization, auth, and error flows; (7) Dockerfile and a Terraform script to deploy one small VM + managed Postgres. Out of scope: scaling to 21 platforms, a public SDK catalog, paid billing integrations, and legal/compliance review. Include error handling, request tracing IDs, and automated unit/integration tests.How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productSocial Media Scraper API — 165 Endpoints | Social Fetch
- official pricingPricing — Social Fetch
- official docsDocumentation — Social Fetch
- open sourceqeeqbox/social-analyzer
- open sourcesherlock-project/sherlock
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
