Back to browse
I built a Web-Scraper API that is 6-7x more efficient than current ones

I built a Web-Scraper API that is 6-7x more efficient than current ones

by polaritymaking·May 14, 2026·14 points·7 comments

AI Analysis

MidSlick

Yet another scraping API, but the schema-by-example approach is cleaner than competitors.

Strengths
  • Schema definition using example values instead of CSS selectors or XPath is genuinely simpler.
  • Flat per-request pricing avoids the credit-bundle games Firecrawl and ScraperAPI play.
  • Auto-escalation to headless rendering with render_mode transparency in responses.
Weaknesses
  • Web scraping APIs are a crowded category with Firecrawl, JinaAI, and ScraperAPI already dominant.
  • No evidence of novel extraction technique — still LLM-based like every other modern scraper.
Target Audience

Backend developers, data engineers building scrapers

Similar To

Firecrawl · ScraperAPI · JinaAI Reader API

Post Description

Runo is a web-scraping API that returns typed, structured JSON. You define a schema (field name, type, example value), and Runo fetches the page and returns the data. No HTML, no parsers, no post-processing.

Over the past few weeks, I have been building this non stop. Currently, every scraper API out there solves the site fetching problem but left the extraction of the actual data entirely to users. Runo makes that completely disappear.

For Runo, I went ahead and added JS rendering, stealth mode, and full LLM extraction to make this a fully functional and capable of scraping most if not all sites.

Also, another major problem with current web scrapers is that they charge per feature or bundle them into expensive credit tiers. A single large or JS rendered request can cost 5-75 credits, which means you essentially get nothing out of their plans. Runo is flat per request, no matter the site. At the Scale tier, Runo works out to $0.90 per 1,000 effective requests vs. around $6 for the nearest Firecrawl equivalent. My jaw dropped when I was testing Runo and came across these numbers.

I created a free tier that is 500 requests/month, no credit card required. Take it for a spin and let me what can be improved. I would love feedback.

Similar Projects

DataMid

GeoLeadScraper – Open-source Google Maps scraper (Chrome extension)

Free Maps scraper when Apify and ScraperAPI already dominate this space.

Ship It
bizdata
205d ago