Kick Chat Scraper & Real-Time Archive

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🎯 What this scrapes

Kick.com is the 4th-largest live-streaming platform (Q3 2025), but unlike Twitch and YouTube it has no public API for past chat. Once a stream ends, the conversation is gone from every Kick surface.

This Actor connects to Kick's public Pusher WebSocket — the same one the kick.com website uses to render chat — subscribes to one or more chatrooms by channel slug, and archives every App\Events\ChatMessageEvent it sees until either a duration window or a message-count cap is reached.

Each archived row carries the message text, the sender's username, slug, chat color, derived role (broadcaster / moderator / VIP / subscriber / user), raw badge list, Kick's message UUID, the original send timestamp, and the scrape timestamp. Think of it as a Kick chat logger that runs while you sleep, then hands you a clean structured dataset when you wake up.

🔥 Features

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — we rotate curl-cffi browser TLS fingerprints (Chrome / Firefox / Safari) on the REST channel-lookup hop so the target sees real-browser traffic, not Python scripts. Reconnects automatically on transient drops.
• 🌐 Proxy-routed REST hop — Apify Proxy on the channel lookup; the Pusher WebSocket itself is direct, low-latency, and unproxied for sub-second message delivery.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — Retry-After honoured; up to 5 attempts per request.
• 🧱 Deterministic stop — exits cleanly when either the time cap or the message-count cap fires; partial successes surface via Actor.set_status_message, never silent exits.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated schema, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable UUIDs, canonical sender_role derived per message with raw badge list preserved.
• ⚡ Real-time multiplex — direct Pusher WebSocket connection, sub-second latency, up to 20 channels on a single socket. No polling.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you pay only for messages that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Brand monitoring — capture every mention of your product across a list of Kick channels while a launch streams live.
• Toxicity / sentiment model training — record real chat at scale for supervised fine-tuning, with role + badge metadata as features.
• Stream highlight detection — surge in messages per minute is a strong proxy for an in-stream moment worth clipping.
• Moderator coverage audits — diff message counts against moderator actions, see which channels need more coverage.
• Streamer self-archive — keep a permanent record of your own community's chat for VOD highlights, AMAs, and giveaways.
• Esports / event coverage — archive multiple tournament channels in parallel.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Enter one or more Kick channel slugs (the part after kick.com/). Lowercase preferred; full URLs are accepted and normalised.
3. Set maxDurationSeconds (default 5 minutes) and maxMessagesTotal (default 1,000). The run exits as soon as either cap is hit.
4. Click Start. Messages stream into the run's dataset as they arrive.
5. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the Apify API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
channelSlugs	array	yes	["xqc"]	1–20 Kick channel slugs (lowercase). URLs accepted and normalised.
maxDurationSeconds	integer	no	300	5–3,600 seconds. Hard 1-hour ceiling per run.
maxMessagesTotal	integer	no	1000	1–50,000 messages across all channels combined.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	Apify Proxy on	Used for Kick's Cloudflare-protected REST channel lookup only — the Pusher WebSocket bypasses the proxy.

Example input

{
  "channelSlugs": ["xqc", "trainwreckstv"],
  "maxDurationSeconds": 600,
  "maxMessagesTotal": 5000,
  "proxyConfiguration": {"useApifyProxy": true}
}

📤 Output

Every row is one archived chat message.

Field	Type	Notes
channel_slug	string	The input slug this message came from.
chatroom_id	integer	Pusher chatroom identifier.
message_id	string	Kick's message UUID.
sender_id	integer | null	Sender's Kick user id (null on system events).
sender_username	string	Sender display name.
sender_slug	string | null	Sender URL-safe handle.
sender_color	string | null	Hex color the sender picked.
sender_role	string	Canonical role: broadcaster, moderator, staff, founder, og, vip, subscriber, user.
sender_badges	array	Raw badge type strings exactly as Kick sends them.
content	string	Message text. May contain [emote:N:name] tokens.
message_type	string	Kick's type field — usually message.
sent_at	string	ISO 8601 UTC timestamp Kick stamped the message with.
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 UTC timestamp this row was written.

Example output

{
  "channel_slug": "abuswe7l",
  "chatroom_id": 31118945,
  "message_id": "8049a026-5c2e-4619-b60d-393b7217f4da",
  "sender_id": 5666938,
  "sender_username": "Soud_x5",
  "sender_slug": "soud-x5",
  "sender_color": "#FF9D00",
  "sender_role": "moderator",
  "sender_badges": ["moderator", "subscriber"],
  "content": "[emote:2506823:azzzjh] hello chat",
  "message_type": "message",
  "sent_at": "2026-05-16T20:40:16+00:00",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-16T20:40:17+00:00"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.05	One-off warm-up charge per run.
result-row	$0.001	Per archived message.

Example: a 5-minute archive of a popular streamer that captures 1,000 messages costs $1.05. A quieter channel with 100 messages over the same window costs $0.15.

🚧 Limitations

• Real-time only. Kick has no public chat-history API. This kick chat scraper archives only chat that is sent while the run is active. There is no way to recover messages sent before the Actor started or after it stopped.
• Public chatrooms only. Followers-only or subscribers-only chat modes require a Kick login and Bearer token; that scope is out of v1.
• Single Pusher cluster. Kick currently uses ws-us2.pusher.com exclusively. If Kick migrates clusters, this Actor will need a version bump.
• No moderation events. Bans, deletions, slow-mode toggles, and pinned-message events are received but deliberately ignored; only App\Events\ChatMessageEvent produces rows. A future sibling Actor will cover moderation.
• No emote image resolution. [emote:N:name] tokens are preserved verbatim in content. Resolve them via Kick's emote endpoints if you need the PNG/SVG.
• 20-channel ceiling per run. The Pusher socket supports up to 20 concurrent chatroom subscriptions. For wider coverage, run multiple Actors in parallel and merge datasets downstream.

❓ FAQ

Is there a Kick API alternative for chat history?

No official one exists. Kick has not published a public API. This Actor is the practical Kick API alternative for chat data — it connects directly to the same Pusher WebSocket your browser uses and archives messages as they arrive. For truly historical data (before this run started) there is no upstream to query; Kick does not store chat after a stream ends.

Why can't I get yesterday's chat or download Kick chat history?

Kick does not store chat. Twitch and YouTube both expose past chat through their APIs; Kick does not. To download Kick chat from a future stream, schedule this Actor to run during the stream and messages are archived as they happen.

Do I need a Kick account or API key?

No. Kick's chat WebSocket is a public Pusher app — the same one your browser uses. This Actor reads it without any authentication. We never log in to Kick.

Is this against Kick's TOS?

We only read what Kick delivers to every public viewer's browser. We do not pose as users, send messages, cast votes, or touch private surfaces. For commercial-scale or sensitive use cases please review Kick's Terms before deploying.

Why is sender_role only one value when the user has multiple badges?

We pick the highest-priority role per message (broadcaster > moderator > staff > founder > og > vip > subscriber > user) so each row carries a single clean label suitable for grouping and filtering. The full badge list is also preserved in sender_badges if you need it.

The run finished with zero rows. What happened?

Either the channel was offline (no live stream means no chat) or it was silent for the configured window. The Actor exits non-zero with a clear status message so you never get a green run hiding an empty dataset.

Can I archive a private or subscribers-only chatroom?

Not in this Actor. That would require a Kick login token; v1 is read-only on public chatrooms. Request a sibling Actor if you need that coverage.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, want a new field, or need a moderation-events sibling Actor? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly.

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Built by Devil Scrapes 😈 — a small fleet of opinionated public-data Actors. Honest pricing, real engineering, zero fine print.