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Scrollhound

Limits & costs

The preview has no plans or billing. Each read that calls a paid data provider has a real cost, which is metered and capped per person.

Spend cap

Section titled “Spend cap”
  • Everyone has a monthly spend cap (default $20; an admin can change yours). When it’s reached, paid commands stop with spend_cap_reached until the 1st of next month. Hacker News and cached reads keep working.
  • With less than 10% left, every command adds a warning.
  • A service-wide daily cap also protects against runaway costs. If it’s hit, paid reads pause until midnight UTC.
  • scrollhound usage (or the account page) shows where you are.

What’s free

Section titled “What’s free”

  • Hacker News, always.

  • Re-reads. Results are cached and shared across users, and a cached result costs nothing:

    What Cached for
    Posts, threads, replies, quotes, Articles, profiles, creator posts 24 hours
    X search 6 hours
    X trends 30 minutes
    Transcripts 30 days
    YouTube videos and channels 24 hours
    YouTube search 12 hours
    Hacker News lists / items and search 5 / 15 minutes
    Subreddit details and rules 24 hours
    Reddit top posts / hot, new, rising posts 1 hour / 10 minutes
    Reddit post with comments 30 minutes
    Reddit search 6 hours

  • Failed and empty results, with one exception: Reddit’s main provider charges for a “not found” (one read, $0.0015). Scrollhound then remembers it for an hour, so asking again is free.

  • Your stored bookmarks (bookmarks list and search). Fetching new ones from X has a small cost.

Typical provider costs

Section titled “Typical provider costs”

Worked out from provider prices in October 2026:

Read Typical cost
An X post $0.00015
An X post or thread through read or x thread, without replies about $0.0054: one page of the conversation (about 36 posts)
An X thread with 20 top replies about $0.011: one page of the conversation (about 36 posts) and one page of replies (about 37), at $0.00015 a post. A long thread by one author reads more pages of replies only while its chain continues
A creator’s last 200 posts about $0.03
An X search page (about 20 posts) about $0.003
X trends about $0.0045
YouTube search, video details, channel uploads free (within YouTube’s quota)
A transcript from captions about $0.002
An AI transcription (no captions) about $0.002–0.004 per 5 minutes of audio
A subreddit with its rules about $0.003 (two reads)
A page of Reddit posts (up to 100) or a Reddit search page about $0.0015
A Reddit post with up to about 500 comments about $0.0015
Bookmark sync $0.005 per new bookmark plus $0.01 per author, at most about $0.15 a day for the hourly checks (X bills each post once a day)

Rate limits

Section titled “Rate limits”
  • About 120 requests a minute per person.
  • YouTube search: about 100 searches a day for the whole service, reset at midnight Pacific time (quota_exhausted until then).
  • If a data provider is rate-limiting, Scrollhound retries once, then fails over to a backup provider where there is one. Reddit has one: on the backup a long thread or a 100-post page can take up to four calls (about $0.0075).

Notional credits

Section titled “Notional credits”

Each request also logs notional credits (for example, 1 per 25 posts read, 1 per transcript), so we can size future plans. They’re informational only; nothing is charged.