What is ScraperAPI?
ScraperAPI is a solution for scraping data. It specifically handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs, so anyone can get the HTML from any web page with a simple API call.
The current industry landscape
One of the most frustrating parts of automated web scraping is constantly dealing with IP blocks and CAPTCHAs. ScraperAPI rotates IP addresses with each request.
How the company was created
The company was founded in 2015 by Dan Ni. He started out as a high-frequency trader on Wall Street. Due to health issues, he left that job and utilized his spare time to teach himself to code.
As a freelance developer, he often had web scraping jobs that required the same tasks. He decided to create ScraperAPI so developers could write web scrapers with little setup. Unlike proxy providers that just give you a list of IP addresses, ScraperAPI handles IP rotation, headless browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the HTML of any web page with a simple API call.
How the company works
Scraper API is used by over 1000 businesses across many different industries. The primary use cases are ecommerce price monitoring (shopping deals sites or SAAS companies catering to ecommerce clients who want to monitor their competition), SERP monitoring (this is mostly for SEO tools who help their clients monitor their rankings on popular search engines), social media (a number of social media monitoring apps and hedge funds use us to get data from popular social networks), real estate/travel sites (real estate and travel apps both use us to gather listing data across a number of platforms), reviews (companies concerned about their reviews will use us to monitor reviews across a number of different platforms).
"Our philosophy is to do one thing and do it well"
Customer stories
Alexander Zharkov
Fullstack Javascript Developer
"I researched a lot of scraping tools and am glad I found ScraperAPI. It has low cost and great tech support. They always respond within 24 hours when I need any help with the product."
Ilya Sukhar
Founder of Parse, Partner at YCombinator
"A dead simple API plus a generous free tier are hard to beat. ScraperAPI is a good example of how developer experience can make a difference in a crowded category."
Check them out: https://www.scraperapi.com/