Terms of Service

These terms govern use of the SocialPipe API, operated by SocialPipe. By creating an account or using the API you agree to them.

1. The service

SocialPipe retrieves publicly available data from the platforms listed in the API reference and returns it as JSON. We return each platform's own record without alteration: we do not select fields, rename them, or reshape the response.

Which platforms those are is a product decision that changes, so this document does not enumerate them. The API reference does, and it is generated from the service itself rather than written alongside it.

We do not host, store or redistribute video, audio or image files. Media addresses in a response point at the platform's own network; we return the address and never fetch the file.

2. Accounts and API keys

You are responsible for keeping your API keys secret and for all use made of them. A key is shown once at creation and cannot be recovered afterwards, because we store only a hash. If a key is exposed, revoke it in the dashboard and tell us through the chat widget.

One account per organisation. Do not share keys with third parties or resell access to them.

3. Credits and billing

The API is priced in credits. Plans and per-call costs are on our pricing page.

Cached responses are free. A repeat read inside the cache window costs no credits
Failed calls are not charged. Anything that is not a success leaves your balance untouched, and a call charged before it failed is refunded
Monthly credits expire at the end of the period they were granted for and do not roll over. Spending draws from the soonest-expiring credits first
Every plan is a hard stop. At a zero balance requests are refused, not billed. There is no overage rate on any plan

Every credit movement is recorded in an append-only ledger. If our records and your expectations differ, that ledger is what we reconcile against, and we will show you the entries.

SocialPipe is the seller of record. Card payments are processed by Stripe; we never receive your card number. Prices exclude VAT, GST and sales tax. We are not currently registered for sales tax in any jurisdiction, so none is added at checkout today.

4. Cancellation and refunds

Cancel at any time; access continues to the end of the paid period. Unused credits are not refunded, and we offer no refunds beyond what the law requires. If a charge is wrong, tell us through the chat widget and we will put it right.

5. Acceptable use

You may not:

Use the API to infringe copyright, or to circumvent a platform's technical protection measures
Evade rate limits or quotas by spreading traffic across accounts
Use the service unlawfully, or to harass, surveil or profile individuals
Build or sell anything whose purpose is to profile, rank or score the individuals appearing in a response, or to combine that data with other sources for that purpose
Use any capability classed bulk-people to assemble a social graph about identified people. Counting a page, ranking the posts in it, or measuring an audience in aggregate is fine. Retaining the individuals as a list of people is not.

The class is stated on every capability's page in the API reference, and the Privacy Policy sets out the rule that assigns it. The restriction is written against the class rather than a list of route names, so it covers every capability of that kind
Derive or record special category data about an individual from a response: racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, trade union membership, health, sex life, sexual orientation, or immigration status

We cannot inspect what you build and do not want the ability to, so enforcement of this section is complaint-driven. If you need bulk graph data for something the list above prohibits, we are not the right supplier.

Build what you like on top of these responses, including something that competes with us. What is prohibited is profiling the people in the data.

We may suspend an account for a breach of this section. Where the breach is a copyright matter, our DMCA policy applies, including termination after three actioned notices in a rolling twelve months.

6. Availability

There is no uptime commitment and no service level agreement. The API is best-effort, and no credit or refund is due for downtime.

Upstream platforms change without notice and may block or degrade extraction. Where we detect a platform returning unusable results we return an explicit error rather than charging for empty data. Interruption caused by an upstream platform is not a failure of these terms.

7. The people in the data

SocialPipe is not affiliated with or endorsed by any platform whose public data it retrieves. Complying with the source platform's terms and with copyright law is your responsibility.

A response contains personal data about people who are neither our customers nor yours: handles, display names, biographies, profile images and engagement counts, for the account you asked about and for anyone they quoted or mentioned. Nothing is pseudonymised, hashed or redacted.

209 capabilities return people in bulk. Each returns a page of accounts or commenters, none of whom is the account you named: followers, following, reposters, repliers, and any search or feed whose results carry a different author each. One call is a social graph, not a lookup. Section 5 limits what you may do with it; this is your notice that you are receiving it.

Each capability's class (no-people, single-subject or bulk-people) is stated on its own page in the API reference, and the Privacy Policy sets out the rule that assigns it. Where the rule cannot tell from a capability's name what it returns, it assigns bulk-people, so a capability in that class may return less than the class implies. It will not return more.

If you store it, you are the controller of it. You need your own lawful basis for retention or profiling, and your own answer for a data subject who asks what you hold. We keep a copy too: since 2026-08-23 we store the parameters you sent and the response we returned, against your account, indefinitely. See the Privacy Policy.

GET /v1/usage returns your own call history, scoped to your account and readable by no other customer.

8. Data protection

Our handling of personal data is in the Privacy Policy and the subprocessor list. A data processing agreement is available on request through the chat widget.

9. Intellectual property

We own the API, documentation and software. You own your account data and the use you make of the output, subject to the rights of whoever owns the source material. We grant no rights in third-party content.

10. Warranties and liability

The service is provided "as is" to the fullest extent permitted by law. We do not warrant that extracted data is complete, accurate or fit for a particular purpose.

Our total liability to you, for all claims together, is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Version	Date	Change
8	2026-09-20	Every email address is removed; the chat widget is now the only way to reach us. Exposed-key reports, billing corrections and data processing agreement requests all run through it. No obligation, restriction, price term or limit has changed — only the channel
7	2026-09-20	Shortened, with no change of substance: three passages describing what earlier versions of this document said were removed, since the log below already records them. Every obligation, restriction, price term and limit is unchanged
6	2026-09-20	Nine platforms are withdrawn from the service. Section 7's count of capabilities returning people in bulk falls from 504 to 209, which is the same rule reporting a smaller catalogue rather than a change to the rule. Section 5's social-graph restriction is unchanged and still applies to every capability classed `bulk-people`
5	2026-09-12	Sections 5 and 7 restated against the personal-data class rather than a list of route names. The fifteen curated route names were removed when the catalogue was generated, so an enumeration naming them would have restricted nothing; 504 capabilities are now classed `bulk-people` and section 5's social-graph restriction applies to all of them. This is the second time that list was found incomplete (the first is row 4), which is the argument for stating a rule instead
4	2026-09-10	Sections 5 and 7 corrected. Both enumerated the routes that return people in bulk and both listed only the X ones, so `tiktok/comments`, in that set since TikTok shipped on 2026-09-09 and disclosed in the privacy policy from that day, was absent from the notice in section 7 and, more importantly, from the social-graph restriction in section 5. The restriction was always intended to cover every bulk-people route; this makes the text say so
3	2026-09-09	Section 1 no longer names a single platform as the whole service. It points at the API reference instead, which is generated from the service itself, so the list cannot drift from what is actually served
2	2026-08-23	Section 8 corrected: we no longer hold "a short-lived cache and nothing else". The parameters you send and the response we return are stored against your account indefinitely
1	2026-08-23	Initial publication