SocialCrawl has published the kind of pricing documentation most usage-based APIs avoid: exactly what one unit buys. In TikTok API documentation: 150 followers per credit, the company leads with the number: “One credit now returns 150 TikTok followers, 48 comments, 49 replies, and 30 search results.” Before a density update on August 29, a credit returned about 20 followers, 6 replies, and 10 search results. This is not TikTok’s own API. SocialCrawl is a unified data API over 50 platforms, and its TikTok endpoints sit alongside the official Research and Display APIs rather than in front of them, with the contrast drawn plainly: the official Research API returns followers at “default 20, max 100, and the payload is two strings: display_name and username,” and it requires the research.data.basic scope.
The per-credit figures are vendor measurements, and the post is honest about which ones it re-ran: “Before-figures come from the 2026-08-29 changelog — not re-measured this run.” What survives independent of the marketing is the billing semantics, which are unusually well specified. “A standard live miss is 1 credit; a cache hit is 0; empty pages and hard fails are refunded; bad params return 400 and are unbilled.” A hidden follower list “returns a definitive 404 at 0 credits, not an empty 200,” which is the difference between an agent concluding an account has no followers and concluding it cannot see them. The rate limits are published too, 600 requests a minute and 50 concurrent per key, and the pagination instruction is one line an agent should take literally: pass the cursor from the response, and “do not invent a field.” The post also advises testing against large public accounts, because a small account returns short pages that look like a bug.
The catalog has the contract the post is describing. The SocialCrawl provider page lists 58 API pages carved from a published OpenAPI 3.1 document of 403 paths and 411 operations, and the story lives on the SocialCrawl Tiktok API, with the SocialCrawl Tiktok Shop API and SocialCrawl Tiktok Ads API beside it. On the Agent Readiness score, error semantics, idempotency, and the rate limit signal are all lit, which matches a provider that documents a 404 at zero cost and refunds hard failures. Reversibility is documented and an MCP server is lit as well.
The Kin Score is 41.5, developing band. Discoverability carries it at 58.3, developer ergonomics at 57.1, contract quality at 52.2. Access clarity is 21.1, contract governance 0.0, operational transparency 31.6. The Agent Readiness score is 37.7, agent-ready. The gap that stands out is access clarity, the facet that reads how clearly a provider explains getting in: signup, keys, plans, and terms. At 21.1 it is the lowest facet on the record, and on a surface built entirely from other platforms’ data, the terms are the first thing a buyer will ask about. The per-credit math is the clearest in the catalog. The access story is the part still unwritten.