mateuszbuda

Welcome to the zoo! ScrapingFish :)

Here you can find statistics based on data scraped from Indie Hackers, but it’s not split by the tool size: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/indie-hackers-revenue

There are many different methods used by proxy providers to unethically source their IPs: https://scrapingfish.com/how-ips-for-web-scraping-are-source...

There’s AWS Bedrock Knowledge Base (Amazon proprietary RAG solution) which can digest PDFs and, as far as I tested it on real world documents, it works pretty well and is cost effective.

You can use a USB hub (example with 20 ports: https://www.sipolar.com/product/a-805p-20-ports-usb-2-0-hub/) and attach multiple USB dongles to it. This blog post describes a setup for web scraping: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

Do you have an idea what would be my external IP address? On my phone connected to a mobile network, I get assigned mobile IP address which is my external IP address. It's not attached to the SIM card because it changes when I reconnected. Is it handles by the BTS software? Do I get assigned an IP address and BTS communicates on my behalf using that address which comes from the mobile network operators pool?

Can I use this to run my own mobile network? Is there something like a blank SIM card which I could use for it? I don't need global coverage but is it possible to create my own BTS on a PC (with some antenna connected to it) and then have my own SIM card which I can insert into regular phone/device and have it connected to my BTS and connect to the Internet?

What exactly doesn't work well? Did you consider playwright?

I don’t really know. I don’t write posts to optimize for SEO (include FAQ at the end or something like that) and hope it’s just good content people will share.

There are also SEO pages which do not have any useful content. I think I should have more of them because my competitors have only SEO pages but I don’t have time for it as I have to focus on the product and customer support. Probably a good mix between useful content blog posts (maybe with SEO filling) and strictly SEO pages is best to bring traffic.

Content marketing - blog posts with useful content posted around the Internet. Most traffic from HN and Reddit.

I think that LLM costs, even GPT-4o, are probably lower compared to proxy costs usually required for web scraping at scale. The cost of residential/mobile proxies is a few $ per GB. If I were to process cleaned data obtained using 1GB of residential/mobile proxy transfer, I wouldn't pay more for LLM.

I agree that web scraping is a shady business in many cases but there is definitely a difference between setting up a few mobile proxies for yourself and using devices and networks which belong to other people without them even knowing this until they cannot access some websites because there was a bot detected in their network.

Here are some insights into how proxies are sourced: https://scrapingfish.com/how-ips-for-web-scraping-are-source...

There's also an option to build your own mobile proxy pool which gives you very good reputation IPs for web scraping and doesn't harm other people: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

I would also include deceptive credits systems used by SaaS which have usage-based like subscriptions. It’s a bait and switch variant. First, you think one call to the API is one credit but it always turns out that you need calls which consume 20 or 50 credits instead and you have to move to a more expensive plan and buy millions of credits every month. Second, unused credits do not roll over to the next month so your effective cost per call is orders of magnitude larger compared to what you expected.

I tried not buying food with added sugar but it’s surprisingly difficult. Here is an interesting analysis I did some time ago which shows that for half of the food items, sugar is the main ingredient: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/scraping-walmart

At https://scrapingfish.com/ we have both options, usage based https://scrapingfish.com/buy and subscriptions (monthly unlimited requests plan) https://scrapingfish.com/unlimited. Despite subscriptions being cheaper option per request, usage based is way more popular. Only less than 10% of our users have subscribed to unlimited monthly plan. I guess usage based plans give users more control over how much they spend or maybe they simply don't want to subscribe to another service.

I’m still working on a web scraping API (https://scrapingfish.com/). For some people it’s evil bot but for others it’s enabler for public data access. I think it’s useful.

Anyone can share experience with https://ollama.com/ ?

We keep working on web scraping API with custom-made mobile proxy pool: https://scrapingfish.com/

There is no AI in it so far but we consider adding support for parsing the result to extract data using LLM.

Two main differentiators. 1. Pricing. We charge for requests and the cost of each successful request is the same as opposed to misleading API credits system used by others. Also, we sell request pack which are valid up to 1 year as opposed to monthly plans with expiring unused API credits. 2. We use our own high quality and ethically sourced mobile proxies as opposed to shared pools from large proxy providers (https://scrapingfish.com/how-ips-for-web-scraping-are-source...).

To give you a reference point, at https://scrapingfish.com/ we charge $0.002 per API call but in our case, the API call gives you the value by itself: access to mobile proxies and cluster of browsers. For you, I would recommend to either give the API access for free as I assume users already pay for the product. Another option would be to include API access only to higher plan users who pay more and this could be an incentive for some users to upgrade their plan.

Only around 5% of the products from IndieHackers generate a monthly revenue exceeding ~$8,333 (around ~$100k/year).

Source: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/indie-hackers-revenue

A web scraping API: https://scrapingfish.com/

I've created a mobile proxy pool for a personal project of web scraping real estate data: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

Then, I expanded the infrastructure and built a web scraping API on top of it: https://scrapingfish.com

0.2 cents is how much a single request costs for well-protect website where web scrapers look for emails (e.g. LinkedIn): https://scrapingfish.com/#pricing

Paying additional 0.2 cents per request, if it can significantly improve your success rate, is not really that much and some people use LLMs for even simpler parsing tasks to save time on development efforts.

Here is an example of how you can scrape data from job boards: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/are-most-rust-jobs-in-crypto

In case you need a web scraping tool: https://scrapingfish.com

Some parts are outdated now. Bot detection vs web scraping is an ever evolving arms race.

Anyway, incolumnitas blog is a great source of information about bot detection and techniques to avoid being detected. We have implemented many successful methods based on it in https://scrapingfish.com/.

Exactly, did you build your own solution for this, maybe based on open source projects, or do you rely on external service for scraping? I'm curious too since I'm developing a web scraping API product (https://scrapingfish.com).

How did you collect this data? Did you just use webscraping? What tools did you use for this?