Project ideas from Hacker News discussions.

Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

3 Dominant Themes from the Discussion

Theme Supporting Quote(s)
1️⃣ Beyond simple scraping – full‑stack data service “yes but we do alot more that may not be clear at first glance, things like brand data, and for scraping handling pdf, ocr, docx, ppt, xlsx automatically” — TheYahiaBakour
2️⃣ Pricing & transparency concerns “Better business model would be some sort of micropayment setup – allow humans, but make scrapers pay a hundredth of a cent for access.” — paytonjjones
“we’ve yet to lose a single bakeoff, there’s no hidden credit multipliers… every single customer who uses us halved their bill + error rate.” — TheYahiaBakour
3️⃣ Competitive landscape & blocking worries “Great, another thing I have to block server side. Reminds me of the image leech protections that had to be in place because bandwidth was expensive.” — archerx
“if you were to ask me, we’re more fully featured than Cloudflare, and anecdotally a ton more reliable in terms of error rates.” — TheYahiaBakour
“I was using Context back when it was still Brand.dev. I found it to be a great product… one of those rare APIs that immediately made a problem I had disappear.” — modo_

Quick Takeaway

  • Feature breadth: The service bundles brand intelligence with multi‑format scraping, aiming to be a one‑stop data source.
  • Pricing clarity: Users appreciate the lack of hidden multipliers and want a micropayment‑style model, though some find the cost high.
  • Market rivalry: Competitors like Firecrawl and Cloudflare are mentioned, with concerns that the service may trigger additional blocking measures and needs to differentiate on reliability and feature depth.

🚀 Project Ideas

ScrapePay

Summary

  • A pay‑per‑scrape API that charges a transparent micro‑fee (e.g., $0.0001 per successful scrape) with no hidden multipliers.
  • Handles PDF/OCR, DOCX, XLSX extraction automatically and respects robots.txt and site policies.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Developers building data pipelines, price‑comparison bots, market‑research tools
Core Feature Micropayment per successful scrape, auto‑rotating residential proxies, built‑in OCR/PDF parsing
Tech Stack Go backend, Postgres, Docker, Kubernetes, Stripe Connect for micro‑transactions
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: micropayment per scrape

Notes

  • Aligns with Hacker News demand for “pay a hundredth of a cent” model; eliminates hidden credit multipliers.
  • Transparent pricing dashboard appeals to engineers who hate surprise fees.
  • Could integrate with existing scraping frameworks to auto‑apply the fee.

AgentContext API

Summary

  • API that returns clean, structured web context (markdown, JSON, screenshots) for LLM agents while honoring robots.txt.
  • Offers world‑class brand‑data extraction and OCR for documents, targeting AI‑first applications.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience AI startups, LLM‑powered apps, chatbots needing up‑to‑date web context
Core Feature Structured markdown output, OCR/pdf parsing, brand‑data extraction, compliance engine
Tech Stack Python FastAPI, Playwright for rendering, Redis caching, AWS S3 for assets
Difficulty Medium
Monetization Revenue-ready: usage‑based pricing (e.g., $0.001 per 1k tokens)

Notes

  • Directly addresses community excitement about “agents need clean context” and the need for reliable, low‑error‑rate providers.
  • Differentiates from competitors by focusing on infra‑level reliability and brand data, not just GTM features.
  • Easy integration via simple HTTP endpoints encourages rapid adoption.

ScrapeGuard Marketplace

Summary

  • A curated marketplace of sites that explicitly permit scraping, with pre‑approved proxy configs and compliance reports.
  • Provides a REST API that returns scrape permissions and usage limits for each whitelisted domain.

Details

Key Value
Target Audience Researchers, analysts, compliance officers, SaaS products needing lawful data access
Core Feature Permissioned scraping catalog, compliance scoring, rotating proxies for approved sites
Tech Stack Node.js/Express, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare Workers for proxy routing
Difficulty Low
Monetization Revenue-ready: subscription tier (e.g., $49/mo for 10k scrapes, $199/mo unlimited)

Notes

  • Solves the “IP/robots.txt” concerns raised in the discussion and offers a legal pathway to scrape.
  • Appeals to users frustrated by anti‑scraping measures and hidden proxy costs.
  • Simple pricing and clear terms make it attractive for hobbyists and enterprise users alike.

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