Scrape Creators Pricing, Explained

What is worth working through is the difference between price per request and cost per useful creator, because those diverge sharply depending on what you are building.

All figures verified 1 October 2026 against scrapecreators.com and docs.scrapecreators.com.

The published tiers

• "1 credit === 1 request (for most endpoints). A few use more, and the exact cost is shown in the docs."
• "Credits never expire." Buy today, use in two years.
• "No credit card required" to start.
• No subscription. These are credit purchases, not monthly plans.
• All tiers include all 37+ APIs. No feature gating by tier, which is rarer than it should be and deserves credit.

Bonus credits on the free tier are earned by telling them how you found them, starring their GitHub repo, and leaving feedback on G

1. Transparent growth loop, and it means a real evaluation costs nothing.

Caching makes the real price lower than list

This is the most underrated part of their model. A cache_max_age parameter accepts 1d, 3d, 7d, 14d or 30d. A cache hit returns "cached": true, "credits_charged": 0.

Repeat reads inside your chosen window are free. For any workload that polls the same creators regularly, say a dashboard refreshing 5,000 tracked profiles daily, caching changes the arithmetic substantially. If 40% of reads hit cache at Business rates, a nominal $99 of monthly consumption lands nearer $59.

Your actual hit ratio is entirely workload dependent, so measure it rather than trusting anyone's example. But the direction is real, and it is a genuine cost advantage over vendors that bill every call.

No rate limits

They publish a dedicated page stating no account level rate or concurrency caps, with guidance to stay below 500 concurrent requests. Combined with non expiring credits, that makes spiky workloads genuinely cheap: a one off backfill of 400,000 profiles can run as fast as you can issue requests, without a plan upgrade to raise a ceiling.

Compare that with per minute tier limits elsewhere, including the Roster API's 60 to 300 requests per minute by tier. For burst backfills, Scrape Creators wins this outright.

Where credits cost more than one

Their docs are specific per endpoint, which is good practice. The pattern worth planning around is that paginated endpoints bill per page. Follower lists, comment threads and post feeds are the ones to watch: pulling 50,000 followers for one creator is not one credit, it is one credit per page of results.

So the headline "1 credit = 1 request" is accurate and also easy to misread as "1 credit per logical object." For profile lookups the two coincide. For bulk list pulls they do not, and the gap can be large.

100,000 profile lookups a month

Profile endpoints are 1 credit each, so 100,000 lookups is 100,000 credits.

The part price per request does not capture

Here is where the comparison gets interesting, and it is not about the number.

A profile lookup requires that you already know whose profile to look up. Scrape Creators' search endpoints are keyword and hashtag text search: /v1/tiktok/search/users, /v1/tiktok/search/keyword, /v1/tiktok/search/hashtag, plus /v1/tiktok/creators/popular which filters only on follower count and country. There is no way to query by engagement rate, niche, city, state, gender or email presence together.

So consider the actual job: find 200 beauty creators in the US with 50,000 to 200,000 followers, above 3% engagement, who have an email.

The Scrape Creators path:

1. Keyword or hashtag search to generate candidates. Several calls, each paginated.
2. Profile lookup on every candidate to get follower counts. 1 credit each.
3. Compute engagement yourself from post level data, which means more calls to fetch recent posts per creator, paginated.
4. Filter down to the 200 that qualify.
5. Discover most have no email, because Instagram's business_email is often null and TikTok returns none. Parse bios, as their own blog posts suggest.
6. Write and maintain all of the above as a pipeline.

If 1 in 15 candidates survives the filter, you enumerated and paid for roughly 3,000 profiles plus post fetches to land 200 usable creators. At 1 credit per profile plus post pulls, call it 6,000 to 10,000 credits, which is still only $6 to $10 at Business rates. The credits are cheap. The pipeline is not.

The creator API path:

curl "https://api.ugcroster.com/v1/creators/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer rsk_your_key_here" \
  -G \
  -d niche=beauty \
  -d country="United States" \
  -d follower_min=50000 \
  -d follower_max=200000 \
  -d engagement_min=0.03 \
  -d has_email=true \
  -d sort=engagement \
  -d limit=100

Two requests of 10 credits each for 200 records, with engagement_rate precomputed and extracted_email populated. 20 credits total and no pipeline.

The honest comparison table

If you are building an analytics product over public social data across many platforms, Scrape Creators is very likely the better buy and the cheaper one. If you are building creator discovery and then doing something with the creators, the pipeline you avoid is worth more than the per request saving, and the workflow endpoints have no equivalent on a scraping API. The UGC Roster API exposes creator search, briefs, campaigns and payouts behind one key at UGCRoster.

Plenty of teams should run both, and that is not a cop out. Scrape Creators for breadth, transcripts, comments and ad libraries; a creator API for discovery, contact and the campaign workflow.

See also the full Scrape Creators breakdown, the SociaVault breakdown, Apify pricing decoded and how creator data APIs compare.

Docs at api.ugcroster.com/docs, reference at api.ugcroster.com/reference, plans at api.ugcroster.com/pricing, keys at api.ugcroster.com/keys.

FAQ

How much does Scrape Creators cost per request?

At the Business pack ($497 for 500,000 credits) it is $0.99 per 1,000 requests. At the Freelance pack ($47 for 25,000 credits) it is $1.88 per 1,000. One credit equals one request for most endpoints, credits never expire, and there is no subscription. Cache hits within your cache_max_age window cost zero credits.

Do Scrape Creators credits expire?

No. Their pricing page states credits never expire, with the phrasing "buy credits when you need them, use them 2 days from now, or 2 years from now." Packs are one time purchases rather than monthly plans, which suits irregular or project based workloads well.

Is there a Scrape Creators free tier?

Yes. 100 credits with no credit card required, plus up to 7,000 bonus credits you can claim by telling them how you found them, starring their GitHub repo and leaving feedback on G

1. That is enough to evaluate the API properly rather than just smoke test it.

Which Scrape Creators endpoints cost more than 1 credit?

Their docs list per endpoint costs and most are 1 credit. The pattern to plan around is that paginated endpoints bill per page, so follower lists, comment threads and post feeds cost one credit per page rather than one per logical object. Bulk list pulls therefore cost considerably more than the headline rate suggests.

Does Scrape Creators have rate limits?

No account level rate or concurrency caps are published, and they maintain a page specifically about it, with guidance to stay below 500 concurrent requests. For one off backfills that is a genuine advantage over per minute tier limits. Their self reported production stats are a 3.12 second average response and a 98.2% success rate, so plan your own retry handling for the roughly 1 in 56 calls that fails.

Is Scrape Creators cheaper than a creator data API?

Per request, clearly yes, and it is not close. Per useful creator, it depends on whether you need discovery. Filtering by engagement, niche, location and email presence is not expressible in their search endpoints, so reaching a qualified shortlist means enumerating candidates, fetching posts to compute engagement, and parsing bios for contact, all as code you write and maintain. The credits stay cheap; the engineering is the cost.