Product Hunt Scraper — Daily Launch Data

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🎯 What this scrapes

Product Hunt publishes a live RSS feed at producthunt.com/feed covering each day's launches across all categories. This Actor wraps it, normalises every row with Pydantic, and pushes structured data straight to your Apify dataset. Run it on a schedule and you get a persistent, queryable record of every public PH launch — no OAuth application, no rate-limit negotiation, no manual checks.

Target keywords this Actor addresses:

• product hunt scraper — track every daily launch automatically
• track product hunt launches — scheduled monitoring with clean output
• product hunt launches csv — export to CSV / Excel / JSON in one click
• product hunt competitor monitoring — watch which categories rival products enter

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so the target sees a browser, not Python.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and fresh exit IP every time a connection is throttled.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After headers honoured exactly.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back we slow down rather than accumulating blocks.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, ready for JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you pay only for results that land in your dataset. No data, no charge (beyond the small warm-up fee).

💡 Use cases

• Startup trend monitoring — diff yesterday's launches against last week to surface rising categories before they go mainstream.
• Investor scouting — pipe every new B2B SaaS launch directly into your CRM the day it ships.
• Product Hunt competitor monitoring — get an alert whenever a rival (or a new entrant in your category) launches on PH.
• Sales lead generation — founders who just launched are primed for outreach. Feed the daily stream into Clay or Apollo for enrichment.
• Automated Product Hunt monitoring via n8n / Make / Zapier — connect the Actor output to Slack, Notion, or a Beehiiv newsletter in minutes.
• Newsletter automation — publish a "Yesterday's top PH launches" digest without manually visiting the site.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — the defaults work out of the box for the global launches feed.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or pull it programmatically via the Apify API.

Scheduling tip: Add a schedule in Apify Console (Schedules tab) to run every 6 hours and maintain a continuous launch feed without any manual effort.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
feedUrl	string	no	https://www.producthunt.com/feed	Global launches feed by default. Topic / collection RSS URLs also work — pass producthunt.com/topics/<slug>/feed to scope to a category.
maxResults	integer	no	20	Cap on launches returned. The RSS window typically covers the most recent 20–50 launches.
includeContent	boolean	no	true	Include the HTML body (tagline / description block). Set to false for lightweight monitoring runs.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": true}	Apify Proxy is recommended — Product Hunt throttles direct cloud IPs during peak hours.

Example input

{
  "feedUrl": "https://www.producthunt.com/feed",
  "maxResults": 3,
  "includeContent": false,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item representing one Product Hunt launch.

Field	Type	Notes
feed_url	string	Source RSS URL used for this run.
title	string	Launch title — usually formatted as Product Name — Tagline.
name	string | null	Parsed product name (everything before the —).
tagline	string | null	Parsed tagline (everything after the —).
link	string	Product Hunt URL for the launch page.
author	string | null	Maker name from the dc:creator RSS field.
content_html	string | null	Full HTML body when includeContent is true.
categories	array	PH topic tags the launch is filed under.
published	string | null	ISO-8601 posted-at timestamp.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 timestamp of when this row was written.

Example output

{
  "feed_url": "https://www.producthunt.com/feed",
  "title": "Devil Scrapes — Honest pay-per-event Apify Actors",
  "name": "Devil Scrapes",
  "tagline": "Honest pay-per-event Apify Actors",
  "link": "https://www.producthunt.com/posts/devil-scrapes",
  "author": "DevilScrapes",
  "categories": ["Developer Tools", "Data & Analytics"],
  "published": "2026-05-15T08:00:00+00:00",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-15T08:05:00+00:00"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.005	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.002	Per dataset item written

Example: scraping 1 000 launches ≈ $2.00. No subscription, no minimum, no card needed to start — every new Apify account gets $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• RSS window is shallow — the feed typically covers 1–2 days of the most recent launches. For historical data going back weeks or months, you need the Product Hunt GraphQL API (separate paid integration).
• No vote counts or comment totals — those live on the rendered HTML page, not in the RSS feed. Use the official PH API for those fields.
• Maker / Hunter details are sparse — dc:creator gives one name; full maker profiles and hunter attribution require the PH API.
• Topic feeds may lag — category-specific feeds sometimes update more slowly than the global feed.

❓ FAQ

Does this replace the Product Hunt API?

No — and we say that honestly. The official PH API has votes, comment counts, maker profiles, hunter data, and a full launch schema. This Actor wraps the free public RSS layer — it's cheaper and needs no OAuth application. Use this for volume monitoring and lead pipelines; use the official API when you need depth.

Can I get Product Hunt launches as CSV?

Yes. Once the run completes, open Storage → Dataset → Export and choose CSV, Excel, or JSON. Every field in the output table is included.

How do I track Product Hunt launches on a schedule?

Open Schedules in Apify Console, create a new schedule pointing at this Actor, set the interval (e.g. every 6 hours), and save. The Actor runs automatically and appends new rows to a named dataset of your choice.

Can I filter to a specific Product Hunt category?

Yes — pass a topic feed URL in feedUrl, e.g. https://www.producthunt.com/topics/developer-tools/feed. Product Hunt exposes per-topic RSS feeds for all major categories.

How do I use this for Product Hunt competitor monitoring?

Run the Actor on a schedule, export or subscribe to the dataset via webhook, and pipe the output into a script that filters for launches in your category. The categories field on each row identifies which PH topics the launch belongs to.

Why is name sometimes null?

Some PH launch titles don't follow the Name — Tagline pattern. In those cases the full title is set and name is left null. The raw title is always available.

Can I get Product Hunt makers' contact information?

This Actor returns the author field (maker name from RSS) but not email addresses or social handles — those aren't in the feed. For contact enrichment, push the link field into an enrichment tool like Clay or Apollo.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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