From the field
What people actually struggle with
This is the job where the free route runs out first, and the people who have hit it are unusually precise about why. From ~180 Reddit and X posts in August 2026, with the vendor clusters excluded.
One number decides this whole page
“The official Data API v3 search.list costs 100 units/call against a 10k/day quota, which dies almost immediately once you're polling multiple keyword combos” r/webscraping, 7 points
What this page can do about it: Exactly right, and worth stating as arithmetic: 100 units a search against a 10,000 unit day is about 100 searches for the entire project, before you spend anything hydrating the results with view counts. Every other call on this page costs 1 unit. That gap is the reason the paid rows on this page exist.
Trading a hard cap for an unknown one
“Roughly what request rate gets you rate-limited / soft-banned on the InnerTube route?” r/webscraping, 7 points
What this page can do about it: Nobody in the research knew, including the person who asked, and we do not either. What we can say is that the request leaves the provider's infrastructure rather than yours, and that the measured success rates shown here are live traffic rather than a claim. That is the honest version of an answer to this question.
Search results are not what a person sees
“I want an API or scraper which helps me replicate the same results when I do a search on mobile. Is there a way?” r/n8n, 1 point
What this page can do about it: No, not exactly, from anyone. On the site the ranking is personalised, regional and signed in; these calls are none of those. Pass a region and language to get nearer a market. No comparison table can tell you whose ordering matches your users, so run your own query through two providers for a cent and diff the two lists.
An agent will write the expensive version by default
“The problem is my playlist contains 1.2k songs but I can only transfer around 60 songs and after that its an error” r/learnpython
What this page can do about it: ChatGPT wrote them a loop that runs one search per track, which at 100 units each is a dead project at song 100. This is the failure this page is really about: the code is fine and the quota model is what nobody read. Tell your agent the price first and it can tell you the run is unaffordable before it starts.
The actual job is a sweep, not a search
“So I built a Python script to scrape YouTube Shorts from a specific niche (AI kids bedtime stories), pull stats, transcripts” r/shortsAlgorithm, 78 points
What this page can do about it: Search, then details, then transcripts, over a niche, on a schedule. That is three jobs on this menu chained, and it is what almost everyone doing this actually wants. Per call pricing makes the sweep something you can size in advance instead of a quota you discover the edge of.
