Billing, errors, and limits

The Scraper API uses prepaid credits. There is no subscription: you buy a balance and spend credits when a lookup completes.

Credit costs

Request	Standard cost
Normalized `profile`	1 credit
Normalized `post`	1 credit
Normalized `posts`	1 credit per page
Any TikTok or Instagram platform operation	1 credit per request or page
`POST /scrape/tiktok/audience`	25 credits

Optional enrichment flags, including include_carousels, include_replies, include_transcript, and include_comments, do not add a separate credit charge. This applies only to enrichments supported inside the normalized request. Instagram transcription is a separate platform-operation request and therefore costs one additional credit when you call it.

Your authenticated Scraper dashboard is authoritative. Negotiated profile, posts, post, or platform-operation rates can be higher than the standard rates above; TikTok audience is always 25 credits. Every response reports the exact amount actually charged in meta.credits_charged and X-Scraper-Credits-Charged.

Deep pagination costs more. Instagram hashtag-search and profile-search page-cursor requests are capped at page 10 by default. Accounts with deep-page access can page to 40 instead, and pages past 10 bill a multiple of the account’s advanced/platform-operation rate: pages 1-10 at 1x, pages 11-20 at 2x, and pages 21-40 at 3x (1, 2, and 3 credits at the standard rate). Ask support to enable it.

Buying credits

The standard purchase ladder is:

Credits in one purchase	Standard price
1,000–100,000	$1.50 per 1,000 credits
100,001–500,000	$1.00 per 1,000 credits
More than 500,000	$0.80 per 1,000 credits

The minimum purchase is 1,000 credits. The entire purchase uses the rate for the tier it falls into; rates are not blended across tiers. Your dashboard quote is authoritative because account-specific pricing can apply.

When a request is charged

Outcome	Charged?
Successful lookup	Yes, at the endpoint’s full rate
Each successful page in a listing	Yes, separately
Platform-confirmed not found (`404`)	Yes, at the endpoint’s full rate
Invalid input, invalid key, empty balance, oversized body, or account rate limit (`400`, `401`, `402`, `413`, `429`)	No
SideShift/data-source failure or timeout (`500`, `502`, `504`)	No; any reservation is refunded
System-capacity rejection (`SCRAPER_SYSTEM_BUSY`)	No; any reservation is refunded

A confirmed 404 is a completed lookup and is billed. Do not retry a not-found response on a loop. A not-found TikTok audience request costs the full 25 credits.

On success, read meta.credits_charged and meta.credits_remaining. Error bodies do not have a meta object; read X-Scraper-Credits-Charged to see whether an error was billed.

Error response

Application errors use JSON with an error code, message, and request identifier:

{
  "error": "INVALID_INPUT",
  "message": "Invalid request body",
  "request_id": "req_8f3c9a2b1d4e6f70"
}

Code	Meaning	Action
`PROFILE_NOT_FOUND`, `POST_NOT_FOUND`	The platform confirmed the resource is unavailable, or the profile exists but publishes no video content. Usually billed.	Stop scheduling that identifier; repeated lookups repeat the charge.
`UPSTREAM_ERROR`, `UPSTREAM_TIMEOUT`	A transient data-source failure. Refunded.	Retry with exponential backoff.
`SCRAPER_RATE_LIMITED`	Your account or endpoint limit is exhausted. Free.	Wait for `Retry-After`.
`SCRAPER_SYSTEM_BUSY`	Shared scraper capacity is temporarily full. Refunded.	Wait for `Retry-After` and retry.
`INSUFFICIENT_SCRAPER_CREDITS`	Your balance is empty. Free.	Buy credits in the dashboard.
`INVALID_INPUT`	Request validation failed. Free.	Correct the named field and resend.
`ENDPOINT_NOT_FOUND`	The requested platform operation does not exist. Free.	Use a documented operation path.

A request that exceeds the server’s approximately 120-second ceiling can be terminated by the gateway with a plain-text 504 rather than JSON. Its credit reservation is reclaimed automatically, which can take several minutes.

Retry policy

Retry only refunded transient failures: 429, 500, 502, and 504. Honor Retry-After whenever it is present. Do not automatically retry deterministic 4xx responses, especially billed 404 responses.

async function scrape(url, body, attempts = 5) {
  for (let attempt = 1; ; attempt += 1) {
    const response = await fetch(url, {
      method: "POST",
      headers: {
        "x-api-key": process.env.SIDESHIFT_SCRAPER_KEY,
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
      },
      body: JSON.stringify(body),
    });

    if (response.ok) return (await response.json()).data;

    const retriable = [429, 500, 502, 504].includes(response.status);
    if (!retriable || attempt === attempts) {
      throw new Error(await response.text());
    }

    const retryAfterSeconds = Number(response.headers.get("Retry-After"));
    const baseDelayMs =
      retryAfterSeconds > 0
        ? retryAfterSeconds * 1000
        : Math.min(30_000 * 2 ** (attempt - 1), 300_000);
    const jitterMs = Math.random() * 1000;
    await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, baseDelayMs + jitterMs));
  }
}

Rate limits

New accounts default to 120 requests per minute across all scraper endpoints. An account can also have a per-endpoint limit. Both use continuously refilling token buckets, so the full minute’s capacity can be used in a burst and then refills over time. Successful responses and 429 errors include:

Header	Meaning
`X-Scraper-RateLimit-Limit`	Capacity of the limit closest to exhaustion
`X-Scraper-RateLimit-Remaining`	Remaining requests in that bucket
`X-Scraper-RateLimit-Reset`	Approximate reset time
`Retry-After`	Seconds to wait after a `429`

Prefer Retry-After on a 429. A slow request can make the reset timestamp stale before you receive the response. SCRAPER_SYSTEM_BUSY is separate from your account limit. It is free, does not consume your account bucket, and should be handled by the same retry policy. For sustained production volume, contact SideShift support to discuss higher limits.

Guides

Reference

Billing, errors, and limits

Credit costs

Buying credits

When a request is charged

Error response

Retry policy

Rate limits

​Credit costs

​Buying credits

​When a request is charged

​Error response

​Retry policy

​Rate limits

Credit costs

Buying credits

When a request is charged

Error response

Retry policy

Rate limits