Comparison
A SocialKit alternative for teams that re-read the same URLs
Sourcevine and SocialKit both turn social URLs into JSON. The difference that shows up on an invoice is caching: our cache hits cost nothing, by default.
SocialKit is a real product with broader coverage than ours: six platforms, forty-plus APIs, AI summaries and downloads. If you need that breadth today, use it. What follows is the narrower thing we do differently, and it matters most if your workload reads the same URLs more than once.
Side by side
| Sourcevine | SocialKit | |
|---|---|---|
| Caching | On by default. A cache hit costs 0 credits and says so in the response and the X-Credits-Charged header. | Opt-in per request (`cache=false` is the default), so a repeated read bills again unless you ask it not to. |
| Failed and dead resources | Private, deleted, unsupported and upstream-failed requests are not charged. | Not documented publicly; check before sweeping a list of old links. |
| Provenance | Every object carries fetchedAt, cached and cacheAgeSeconds, so you can tell how old a number is. | Response freshness is not surfaced as a field. |
| Coverage | 3 platforms, 10 APIs. Narrower on purpose — every page maps to a shipped operation. | 6 platforms, 40+ APIs, plus AI summaries and media downloads. |
| Contact data | Outside the product boundary. No bios, emails, phone numbers or login-walled data, enforced by an allowlist. | Returns profile bios and descriptions. |
| Pricing source | The public price table is generated from the same registry that bills the request. | Published per plan; per-endpoint credit costs are not broken out. |
Compared against publicly documented behaviour. Products change — check anything here that would decide it for you.
Choose SocialKit
- You need Facebook, X or LinkedIn, which we do not serve.
- You want AI summaries or media downloads as part of the API.
- You need comments or search today — both are on our list, neither has shipped.
Choose Sourcevine
- Your workload re-reads the same profiles or posts, where a free cache hit is the whole cost difference.
- You are reconciling numbers and need to know how old each one is.
- You need to be able to tell a customer, in writing, that no contact data is fetched or stored.
The APIs this refers to
Pricing is published per API and generated from the registry that bills the request. Billing rules, including what is never charged, are in the billing docs.
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