utility

Plan the calls for a job

Turn a job written in plain words ("track mentions of Acme on TikTok and Reddit", "a creator's profile, posts and comments") into the exact calls to make, in order: method, path, the parameters your question filled, the ones still missing, which step's rows fill a later step, the credit price of each call, and a curl for each with every unknown value left as a {placeholder}. Jobs are planned from the task-recipe catalog (GET /v1/utility/recipes: comment exports, creator vetting, review comparisons, monitors, crawls and more) plus brand monitoring, one creator, a topic search and a saved search on a monitor; a one-call question returns that one call, and a job that combines several sources no recipe covers is planned as a chain (one call per source, a monitor per call when it repeats). A request to act on an account (post, reply, like, follow, delete) or about billing returns no steps. Every plan carries total: the whole job's credits (paging and per-row fan-out included, for the recipe's stated size) from the same pricing the API bills with. A question outside those returns uncertain with no steps instead of a guessed chain, and anything the API cannot return (a follower history, a new-post webhook) is listed under cannot. A search value that names no topic (a placeholder such as "keyword", a country name, an English phrase for a Korean or Chinese platform, or most of the sentence) is left out and asked for under missing, with a note saying why. A job that lists several topics plans each search step once per topic and names them under topics; one that names several markets is uncertain and lists them as ISO codes under markets. Beta: recipe matches are reliable; confirm a single-endpoint or multi-source plan with utility/find. Nothing is run. Free to call.

get/utility/plan

Request

  • Base URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1
  • URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/utility/plan
  • Auth: API key in header x-api-key

Query parameters

querystring

The job in plain words, in any language. Up to 600 characters are read. Provide this or task (one of: query, task; at least one required)

taskstring

Alias for query (utility/find's name). Provide this or query (one of: query, task; at least one required)

Headers

Cache-Controlstring

Send no-cache to bypass the response cache and force a live fetch. Billed at the normal endpoint cost; the fresh result is written back to cache for the next caller. Only the no-cache directive triggers this. See the Response Schema guide for details.

Idempotency-Keystring

Optional UUID that makes the request safely retriable. The key is reserved atomically per account before billing. A concurrent retry receives 409 IDEMPOTENCY_IN_PROGRESS with a Retry-After of 1 second while the original is young, growing to a quarter of the time it has been running (at most 30); a crashed reservation expires after 5 minutes. A replay keeps the cached payload immutable except for billing metadata: credits_used becomes 0, idempotent_replay becomes true, and credits_remaining is refreshed to the current balance. A known current balance appears in both the body and X-Credits-Remaining header; no balance row resolves to 0. On a transient lookup failure, body credits_remaining is null and X-Credits-Remaining is omitted. Completed outcomes expire after 24 hours. If the claim store is unavailable, the request fails closed before billing. GET endpoints do not combine idempotent replay with Server-Sent Events: use Accept: application/json when sending this header. The unsupported key-plus-SSE combination is rejected before billing.

Response

Successful response

successboolean required

Whether the request succeeded

platformstring required

Platform name

endpointstring required

API endpoint path

credits_usedinteger required

Number of credits consumed

credits_remaininginteger nullable required

Current account balance, or null when this response could not establish one. Free cache hits always return null because they do not establish an authoritative post-request balance. An idempotency replay also returns null when its current-balance lookup fails. It is never a fabricated zero, so a zero here means the account really is empty. The authoritative reading is the one on a billed response, which comes straight from the deduction.

request_idstring required

Unique request identifier for support

cachedboolean required

Whether the response was served from cache

idempotent_replayboolean

True only when this response is an idempotency replay

Example response

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "utility",
  "endpoint": "/v1/utility/plan",
  "credits_used": 1,
  "credits_remaining": 4999,
  "request_id": "req-abc123",
  "idempotent_replay": true,
  "meta": {
    "hint": {
      "code": "search_multi",
      "message": "You searched \"matcha\" on 3 platforms one call at a time; /v1/search/multi returns each platform's own search rows in one call at the same price per platform, and a platform with no rows is not charged.",
      "method": "GET",
      "path": "/v1/search/multi?query=matcha&platforms=instagram,tiktok,youtube"
    }
  }
}

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.