I wanted one script that pulls a week's worth of marketing performance data — Gumroad sales, YouTube views, Dev.to stats, Product Hunt votes, Hacker News mentions, Pinterest and Instagram engagement — into a single markdown report I could review every Monday instead of manually checking seven dashboards. Here's what worked immediately, what didn't, and why.
What worked with almost no friction: Gumroad's sales API, YouTube Data API v3, Dev.to's own API, and the Algolia-powered Hacker News search API. All four are either keyless (HN) or a five-minute token generation away, and all four returned clean, predictable JSON on the first real request.
What broke immediately: Pinterest and Instagram. Pinterest's v5 API gated most useful endpoints behind an approved "Standard Access" application tier — a plain access token gets you a 401 with a message pointing at their support team, not the endpoint. Instagram's Graph API needs a long-lived token minted through a Facebook Developer app linked to a converted Business/Professional account and a Facebook Page — there's no shortcut, and a malformed or expired token fails with a generic "Cannot parse access token" error that gives you almost nothing to debug from.
The design choice that mattered most: every platform pull is wrapped independently, and a failure in one (missing credentials, an API error, an auth failure) logs a line and moves on rather than crashing the whole run. Marketing automation scripts get run unattended or by someone non-technical — a single broken credential shouldn't mean zero data instead of six-sevenths of the data.
What I'd tell someone building the same thing: budget real setup time for Pinterest and Instagram specifically if you want them included — they're not "add an API key" integrations like the others, they're "apply for access and wait" integrations. Build and ship the script with the easy platforms first rather than blocking the whole automation on the slow ones.
If you're curious what this actually surfaces: two weeks of real data already showed something worth acting on — a piece of Short-form video content that looked like a 50x outperformer against long-form on a partial-week pull turned out to be closer to 3x once a full week of data came in. Automating the pull is only half the value; not overreacting to a partial window is the other half.
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