ScrapeNinja

"A bootstrapped web scraping API with 10K+ subscribers, featuring dual rendering engines and stealth-mode puppeteer for high success rates against anti-scraping measures."
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scrapeninja.net
Maker: jetter
no rev. info provided; 10K+ subscribers suggests significant revenue for a SaaS API)

Marketing Channels

Primary

API marketplace / organic discovery

10K+ subscribers indicates strong organic or marketplace-driven acquisition

Secondary

Hacker News

Shared on HN to reach developer audience

Ongoing

Product website

scrapeninja.net serves as the main landing page and documentation hub

Growth Levers

  • Leverage the 10K+ subscriber base for social proof and testimonials
  • Fix UI issues (off-center heading on high-DPI screens) to improve conversion on the landing page
  • Create content around anti-scraping bypass techniques to capture developer search traffic
  • Offer a free tier or generous trial to convert hobbyist scrapers into paying customers
  • Build integrations with popular automation platforms (Zapier, Make, n8n) to reach non-developer users
  • Publish comparison content against competitors (ScrapingBee, Bright Data, etc.) targeting decision-stage keywords

First Customer Strategy

Built a web scraping API that solves the core pain of bypassing anti-scraping techniques, which is a well-known frustration for developers. The combination of dual rendering engines and stealth-mode puppeteer with multiple proxy providers under the hood provides a compelling technical advantage. Bootstrapped growth to 10K+ subscribers.

Pricing Insight

No specific pricing mentioned in the thread. The API subscription model with 10K+ subscribers suggests a freemium or tiered API pricing structure typical of developer tools.

New Market Opportunities

  • Personal/hobbyist web scraping for content conversion A commenter scrapes websites to convert content to .epub format for e-reader use, suggesting a consumer-adjacent market for content extraction and format conversion
  • Anti-scraping bypass tooling The 'stealth mode' question highlights strong developer interest in anti-detection capabilities as a standalone feature or selling point

Key Takeaways

  • • Web scraping APIs can scale to 10K+ subscribers by solving the hard technical problem of bypassing anti-scraping measures
  • • Bootstrapped SaaS products in developer tooling can grow primarily through organic discovery and word-of-mouth
  • • Even successful products can have basic UI bugs (off-center text on high-DPI screens) that may hurt conversion — community feedback is valuable
  • • The 'messy codebase' admission is relatable and demonstrates that technical perfection is not required for commercial success
  • • Stealth/anti-detection capabilities are a strong differentiator in the competitive web scraping market

Sentiment Analysis

1 Pos / 1 Neu

Notable Quotes

"What does 'stealth mode' mean? Quite curious, I have been scraping some websites for my girlfriend with nodejs/puppeteer and put the content on an .epub file — DanielHB"
"Small piece of feedback, the main text 'Smart Web Scraping API' looks pretty off-center to me. Using latest Chrome on Mac on a 4k screen. — rsanek"

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