Show HN: KonbiniAPI – One API for Instagram and TikTok Data, Same JSON Shape (opens in new tab)

(konbiniapi.com)

1 pointsFdezRomero8d ago2 comments

Hi HN, I built KonbiniAPI because every social media scraping API I tried returned raw platform JSON with different field names, structures, and conventions per platform. You end up writing adapters and fixing breaking changes instead of building your product.

KonbiniAPI normalizes everything into ActivityStreams 2.0 (the same W3C standard behind the Fediverse). A TikTok user and an Instagram user come back with the same fields: type, preferredUsername, followerCount, etc. Build once, add new platforms without code changes.

What it does:

- 30 endpoints across Instagram (10) and TikTok (20)

- Profiles, posts, comments, stories, search, followers, transcripts, and more

- Every request fetches live public data — nothing cached

- No rate limits, simple credit-based pricing

- One request = one credit, failed requests are refunded

Tech: Hono + Chanfana, OpenAPI schema auto-generated from endpoint definitions, and in-house scraping infrastructure.

Site: https://konbiniapi.com

Docs: https://docs.konbiniapi.com

OpenAPI spec: https://docs.konbiniapi.com/openapi.json

Happy to answer any questions about the architecture, the normalization approach, or the scraping challenges.

2 comments

BetterWhisper8d ago

What scraping challenges? From your pricing I can say you are just using other APIs and you are a layer on top of them. Also your docs mix insta and TikTok results

FdezRomeroOP6d ago

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

On the docs: you caught a real bug. There were some paginated Instagram endpoints that were inheriting TikTok data in the response examples because of a shared base schema, and the override was not being applied correctly. Already fixed and deployed now.

On the architecture: I'm not wrapping any third-party API providers. I scrape directly from TikTok and Instagram with Puppeteer + Chromium running on Cloud Run, built from scratch. If I were buying from a third-party scraping API, the economics wouldn't work: those run for $1–3/1k, and I'm selling at $1.11–1.96/1k. The margins only make sense if you own the infra.

The scraping challenges are very real: TikTok fingerprints headless browsers aggressively, signs all requests, rotates session requirements, and rate-limits by behavioral patterns rather than just request volume. This infrastructure is what makes it possible to offer no rate limits with great reliability.

The added value is the normalization layer: every response follows ActivityStreams 2.0, so a TikTok user and an Instagram user come back with the same fields. You write your code once and it works across both platforms.

Appreciate you taking the time to look closely enough to catch the response issue.

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