Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by spaceman_2020 1123 days ago
I don’t want to scrape, but at these price points, small projects where I only need basic user profile data are simply more cost effective with scraping.

Some very dumb decisions with their API pricing. How do you go from $0 to $100 to $5,000?

2 comments

When scraping with good expensive proxies is effectively cheaper than using the API the company is doing something wrong
Or right, depending on your perspective.
Serving API calls is way cheaper than serving scraper bots that load up the full page.
The site doesn't mention how many profile lookups are allowed per month at the given tiers... how many user profiles are you looking up? Does this include tweets/retweets?

As for the pricing, it's likely they really don't want anyone unlikely to hit the upper tier to even try developing against their APIs to begin with.