Developers struggle to keep website data extraction reliable
Developers and data teams need recurring data from websites that lack APIs or expose it through dynamic, difficult-to-parse pages. They write one-off scripts, reverse-engineer network requests, and manually refine or clean up results; browser-based jobs can also be brittle and resource-intensive. A focused product could help create editable extractors, validate their output, and run them reliably—without trying to automate every website task.
For developers and small data teams building recurring web-data pipelines. Mentioned from Aug 2017 to May 2026 on Bluesky, GitHub, Hacker News and Stack Exchange.
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40 different people described this problem in 39 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 6.0/10
- Pain
- 6.0/10
- Frequency
- 10.0/10
- Willingness to pay
- 3.5/10
- Momentum
- 5.0/10
- Who pays
- Businesses
- Competition
- High
- Build difficulty
- Medium
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
I have a challenging, repetitive developer task that I need to do ~200 times. It’s for scraping a site and getting similar pieces of data
Almost every data job I've had, have had such part time projects going on internally, typical "How do we automate data extraction from [x] site" where the websites either refuse to provide any services, or simply can't (don't have the resources).
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
- 2 product ideas with the smallest useful version and pricing
- 4 places to find your first customers
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- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks