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Show HN: AI web scraper (no selectors, $2/1k pages, built by 1 dev) (web.instantapi.ai)
4 points by zeeb0t 403 days ago
Hi HN - I’m the solo founder of InstantAPI, a web scraping API that turns any webpage into structured JSON without HTML selectors or coding. I built it because I was frustrated with scraping tools that required setup, CSS parsing, or came with confusing pricing and limits.

InstantAPI is designed to be radically simpler and more scalable:

- You send a URL and the data structure you want (via example or JSON schema) - it returns just that, parsed by AI.

- It handles JavaScript, CAPTCHAs, and rotating proxies automatically.

- You can /scrape any page, extract /links by description, automatically find /next page in paginated results, and /search Google SERPs.

- No per-feature pricing - just a flat $2 per 1,000 fully scraped pages, including all rendering and AI parsing.

- It includes a no-code protocol (MCP) that lets LLM agents request structured data directly, without wasting tokens on markdown or full page content.

I built this alone using AI tools and bootstrapped it all - and in testing it’s outperformed a few VC-backed tools that charge 10x more or require selector logic and scraping scripts.

Would love your thoughts, questions, or feedback. Happy to share tech details or walk through how it works. Thanks!

1 comments

Sounds interesting. Which AI are you using to generate the code? Or is it one you built yourself. Can you confirm the accuracy of all the generated code?
Sorry for the late response.

I am self hosting Qwen3 and also use a series of models from OpenAI as a fallback / load balance.

I don't guarantee accuracy of data, however I have built in mechanisms for the AI to critique its own response before returning, which means that it is considered by my users to be accurate enough to be a major part of their production data workflows now.