Scrapfly

Scrapfly was built in France around 2020 by a team of web scraping engineers who had spent years building custom scrapers and fighting anti-bot systems. The insight: every company building a scraper wasted 80% of their time on infrastructure — rotating proxies, browser rendering, CAPTCHA solving, rate limiting — rather than on the actual data they needed. Scrapfly provided a single API that abstracted all of that: send a URL, get back the rendered HTML, with proxy rotation, headless browser support, and anti-bot bypass handled automatically. The pricing was usage-based, making it accessible to small scraping projects and scalable for large ones. Scrapfly spread through developer communities, HackerNews, and search traffic targeting web scraping tutorials. It became a popular alternative to ScraperAPI and Apify for developers who needed serious rendering capabilities. Revenue grew to $50k+/month from thousands of developer and business subscribers. A technical product for technical users, built by engineers who knew exactly what pain they were solving.