Stack Overflow API

Developers & tech · v1.1.0 · stackoverflow

$0.0003 / question

$0.24 / 1K · pay per delivered question

A Stack Overflow API that returns questions as rows — title, score, answer and view counts, the answered and accepted-answer flags, tags, the asker with their reputation, the timestamps and the permalink. Search by keyword, by tag set, or both, across Stack Overflow or a sister Stack Exchange site, sorted by votes, activity, creation or relevance.

By Aldo Morese, founder of QuanticData · Published Aug 21, 2026 · Updated Sep 3, 2026

Run in dashboard See the request

$0.0003 per delivered question · $2 free every month · Failed runs never billed

What it does

What a Stack Overflow API does

Stack Exchange already exposes a clean public API, and the friction is not the schema but the throttle: it keys quota to your IP and to a registered app, so a job that pulls thousands of questions across tags spends more time waiting out backoff than reading. This collector calls that same official API through rotating exits, which spreads the per-IP throttle across addresses, so you get the canonical fields without registering a key or nursing a quota.

Every row is decision-ready metadata: score and view_count as integers, is_answered and has_accepted_answer as booleans, tags as an array, and the asker's author_reputation alongside the name. That is enough to rank questions by demand, filter to the ones still lacking an accepted answer, or weight a signal by the reputation of who is asking — without opening a single page.

Inputs

The whole request. Anything you leave out falls back to the default shown in the catalog.

Input	Type	Required	What it does
`query`	string	no	Keyword to search in titles/bodies.
`tags`	string	no	Semicolon-separated tag filter, e.g. python;beautifulsoup.
`site`	string	no	Stack Exchange site (default stackoverflow). One of: `stackoverflow`, `superuser`, `serverfault`, `askubuntu`, `mathoverflow`, `unix`, `dba`, `security`, `datascience`.
`sort`	string	no	Sort order. Default: relevance when a query is given, votes for a tag-only listing. One of: `votes`, `activity`, `creation`, `relevance`.
`include_body`	boolean	no	Also deliver the question body as plain text (same call, larger rows).
`max_results`	integer	no	How many questions to deliver at most (1–100). You pay only for delivered questions.

Outputs — 22 fields, one row per question

What one question looks like

Every delivered question carries these fields. Nullable means the source did not publish it — the field stays empty instead of being guessed.

Field	Type	What it holds
`rank`	integer	1-based position.
`question_id`	integer	Stack Exchange question id.
`title`	string	Question title (entities decoded).
`score`	integer · nullable	Net votes.
`answer_count`	integer · nullable	Number of answers.
`view_count`	integer · nullable	Views.
`is_answered`	boolean	Has at least one upvoted answer.
`has_accepted_answer`	boolean	An answer is accepted.
`tags`	string[]	Question tags.
`author`	string · nullable	Asker display name.
`author_reputation`	integer · nullable	Asker reputation.
`created_at`	string · nullable	Asked at (ISO 8601).
`last_activity`	string · nullable	Last activity (ISO 8601).
`link`	string · nullable	Question permalink.
`accepted_answer_id`	integer · nullable	Id of the accepted answer.
`author_id`	integer · nullable	Asker's user id on that site.
`author_url`	string · nullable	Asker's profile URL.
`last_edit`	string · nullable	Last edit time (ISO 8601).
`closed_at`	string · nullable	When the question was closed (ISO 8601).
`closed_reason`	string · nullable	Why it was closed (Duplicate, Needs more focus…).
`license`	string · nullable	Content license (CC BY-SA 4.0…).
`body`	string · nullable	Question body as plain text — only with include_body.

Integration

One POST, typed rows

Base URL https://api.quanticdata.io/v1, Bearer auth, the same key as every other Data API. Endpoint: POST /v1/scraper/collectors/stackoverflow/run.

curl -X POST https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scraper/collectors/stackoverflow/run \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $QD_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"web scraping","sort":"relevance","max_results":30}'

import requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scraper/collectors/stackoverflow/run",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {QD_API_KEY}"},
    json={
        "query": "web scraping",
        "sort": "relevance",
        "max_results": 30
    },
    timeout=120,
)
for row in r.json()["payload"]["results"]:
    print(row)

const res = await fetch(
  "https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scraper/collectors/stackoverflow/run",
  {
    method: "POST",
    headers: {
      Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.QD_API_KEY}`,
      "Content-Type": "application/json",
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({"query":"web scraping","sort":"relevance","max_results":30}),
  },
);
const { payload } = await res.json();
console.table(payload.results);

claude mcp add quanticdata \
  -e QUANTICDATA_API_KEY=qd_live_your_key_here \
  -- npx -y quanticdata-mcp

# then, in the chat:
> run the stackoverflow collector with query="web scraping" and sort="relevance"

Example response

POST /v1/scraper/collectors/stackoverflow/run

$ curl $QD/stackoverflow/run \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $QD_API_KEY" \
    -d '{"query": "web scraping", "sort": "relevance", "max_results": 30}'
{ "status": "done", "count": 30,
  "results": [
    {
      "question_id": …,
      "title": "…",
      "score": …,
      "answer_count": … } ],
  "cost": 0.009 }
# 30 questions × $0.0003 · nothing delivered, nothing charged

Try it

Stack Overflow questions, running now

Change the input and run it against the live collector — nothing to install, no sign-up.

Run it from your own code, on your own inputs

Same collector, same rows — $2 of free API credit every month, no card.

Get my free API key

Stack Overflow API: from query and sort, QuanticData reads the Stack Overflow questions and returns one row per question with title, score and answer_count, at $0.0003 per delivered question. — You send query and tags; the run goes out through a residential exit and comes back as questions with rank, question_id and title — 22 fields on every row — and you are billed $0.0003 for each question actually delivered, nothing for a run that delivers none.

$0.0003 / question6,666 questions on the free $2 every month

Semantic inputquery, tags, site — no URL lists

Up to 100questions per run, pagination handled for you

No browserread over HTTP/TLS — cheaper and faster than rendering

Pricing

Stack Overflow API pricing

$0.0003 per delivered question. A run that delivers nothing costs nothing: blocked pages, challenges and retries are on us, and the $2 monthly allowance covers about 6,666 questions before you spend anything.

$0.0003per delivered question$0.24 per 1,000 delivered questions

6,666 questionson the free allowance$2 every month, no card

Zero rowszero chargeblocks, captchas and retries are on us

−30%on volume tiersthe catalog returns your key's price

Pay as you go

$0/mo

$2 free credit / month
60 requests / min
List unit prices

Starter

$19/mo

$15 free credit / month
300 requests / min
10% off unit prices

Growth

$79/mo

$50 free credit / month
600 requests / min
20% off unit prices

Scale

$299/mo

$250 free credit / month
1,200 requests / min
30% off unit prices

Same wallet, same key and same $2 monthly allowance as every other Data API. Prices are launch pricing read live from the billing config — GET /v1/scraper/collectors returns the price your key actually pays.

What people build with the Stack Overflow API

Three shapes of work this endpoint was designed around.

Developer demand research

Pull the high-view, high-score questions for a tag and you have a ranked map of what people actually get stuck on — the raw material for docs, content or a product gap analysis.

Unanswered-question mining

Filter to questions with no accepted answer in your area and you have a live list of where expertise, or a helpful bot, has room to add something.

Cross-site technical corpora

Point the same query at Server Fault, Super User, Ask Ubuntu or the other sister sites to assemble a topic dataset that reaches past Stack Overflow itself.

Stack Overflow API versus rolling your own

The differences that actually cost time when you build this in-house.

	DIY scraper	This collector
Access	Register an app, hold a key	Keyless — the public API, called for you
Throttle	Quota pinned to your IP and app	Spread across rotating exits
Sites	One endpoint per site to wire up	Nine Stack Exchange sites behind one input

What people search for

Live autocomplete demand around Stack Overflow questions, pulled with our own Keyword ideas collector.

Stack Overflow API: the POST to the stackoverflow collector, 30 questions delivered and the bill, 30 × $0.0003 = $0.009 in usage.cost_usd; zero questions would cost $0. — The same call you would paste into a terminal: a Bearer key, query, sort and tags in the body, and back the envelope every QuanticData endpoint returns — type, message, payload — where count is how many questions arrived and usage.cost_usd is $0.009, which is 30 × $0.0003. A run that delivers nothing costs nothing. The key is good for 60 req/min on the free tier.

Sources and standards

The platform documentation and standards this collector is built against — check any claim on this page against the primary source:

FAQ

Questions we get about the Stack Overflow API.

Something else? Ask us

Is this scraping the Stack Overflow web pages?

No. It calls the official public Stack Exchange API, so the fields — score, answers, views, accepted-answer flag, tags, reputation — are the canonical ones, not values parsed out of rendered HTML. The collector's job is to run it keyless and absorb the per-IP throttle for you.

Which sites can I query besides Stack Overflow?

Super User, Server Fault, Ask Ubuntu, Math Overflow, Unix & Linux, Database Administrators, Information Security and Data Science, chosen with the site input. The query, tag filter and sort behave the same on each.

Do I get answer text or just the question?

Question-level metadata and the permalink, not the answer bodies. You get the counts and flags — how many answers, whether one is accepted, the score and views — which is what you need to rank or triage; follow the link when you want the thread itself.

Is there a free Stack Overflow API?

Every account gets $2 of credit every month with no card, which is about 6,666 delivered questions on this endpoint at $0.0003 each. It renews monthly, and a run that delivers nothing is never billed — so a failed or blocked attempt does not eat the allowance.

How much does one run cost?

Multiply the rows you actually receive by $0.0003. A run capped at 100 questions — the maximum for this collector — costs $0.03 if every row comes back, and less when the source has fewer. Volume tiers take up to 30% off, and GET /v1/scraper/collectors returns the price your key actually pays.

Run the Stack Overflow API now

$2 of free credit every month, no card. Your key returns its own prices from GET /v1/scraper/collectors.

Run in dashboard

Illustration: three coloured zones of the page that is read (Stack Overflow questions) turn into clean JSON with the fields title, score and answer_count; 22 fields on every row.