

Show HN: Scrape.it – Change-Resilient Web Scraper - notastartup
https://scrape.it/tour3

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pablohoffman
We released a similar open source tool for visual scraping, earlier this year,
called Portia:
[https://github.com/scrapinghub/portia](https://github.com/scrapinghub/portia)

It's been getting quite a bit of traction and we're currently working on the
integration with Scrapinghub platform (disclaimer: I work there) for those who
prefer a hosted version.

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ryeon
For simple web scraping, I find that kimonolabs.com does a perfectly fine job.

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notastartup
I love what they are doing with kimono and import.io

There's no free lunch lets put it that way. It's free, it's simple but
limiting for doing anything heavier. It covers only a small portion of the
websites. You can't crawl all the links in a website and hard to scrape data
from dynamic webpages etc. Also I found that some websites wouldn't even load
making it impossible to define the fields to scrape.

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davidbarker
I tend to stick with KimonoLabs, but I did try
[http://parsehub.com](http://parsehub.com) for a while. It's a lot more
complicated, but it allows you to scrape dynamic sites.

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scrape-it
Excellent choices. We try to take the pros and cons from each of those
services and make it better. Basically, Scrape.it aims to be simple to use
like Kimono and able to handle complex websites as well.

You can scrape websites like Kayak and Airbnb as well by following the
Scrape.it Tool.

We also have a dedicated number of hours every month to create the jobs for
you so you could just tell us the websites you want to scrape.

We then monitor the jobs so that they will continue working without
interruptions (ip throttle, website layout changes).

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jbob2000
I can imagine some scenarios where you would use a web scraper, but I'm
curious; What are people actually using a web scraper for? Does anyone have
one in production?

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Mandatum
I use one to scrape session times from local theatre websites. They don't have
the capacity to build an API so I have an agreement with them that they keep
the formats the same. I've set up a script which alerts them if they've
screwed it up.

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dailen
Holy crap that's expensive!

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warkdarrior
This is ripe for resellers to move in and make some dough.

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notastartup
Can you describe what you mean by resellers?

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warkdarrior
One can open an account with scrape.it, pay for the enterprise option, and
then share login credentials with other people for a small fee. For example,
an enterprise account costs $899/month. You could "resell" it as described
here to 100 people for $9/month each, and make $1/month in profit.

