FutureTools Scraper

Extract the complete FutureTools.io AI tools directory — 4,000+ tools with names, descriptions, pricing tiers, categories, upvote counts, website URLs, and featured/Matt's Picks status. One run delivers the entire dataset; no pagination or authentication required.

What does it do?

FutureTools Scraper fetches the full AI tools listing from FutureTools.io — the leading AI tools directory curated by tech creator Matt Wolfe. The page embeds all tool data directly in the HTML as React Server Components SSR JSON, so the actor extracts 4,000+ tools in a single HTTP request with no browser automation required.

Each result includes:

• ✅ Tool name, slug, and short description
• ✅ Official website URL
• ✅ Logo image URL
• ✅ Pricing tier (free, freemium, paid, open-source)
• ✅ Featured flag and Matt's Picks flag
• ✅ Community upvote count
• ✅ Category names and slugs (up to 3 categories per tool)
• ✅ Search tags
• ✅ Publication date on FutureTools
• ✅ Direct FutureTools.io page link

Filter by category, pricing tier, featured status, or keyword — or pull everything at once and process it yourself.

Who is it for?

🔬 AI researchers and analysts tracking the AI tools landscape for competitive intelligence, market mapping, or trend analysis across 25+ categories.

📊 Product managers and startup founders benchmarking their tool against competitors or identifying gaps in the market by pricing tier and category.

🛠️ Developers and no-code builders who want a regularly refreshed AI tools dataset for their own directory, recommendation engine, or productivity app.

📣 Content creators and marketers writing about AI tools — get current pricing data, upvote rankings, and category breakdowns without manually browsing hundreds of pages.

🏢 Enterprise teams building internal AI tool catalogs or governance inventories by scraping the latest additions from FutureTools automatically.

Why use it?

FutureTools.io is one of the most trusted AI tool directories online with 4,000+ curated tools and millions of monthly visitors. Manually exporting or copying this data is prohibitively slow. This actor extracts the full dataset in under 30 seconds with:

• No browser needed — pure HTTP extraction, fast and cheap
• Full dataset in one request — all 4,000+ tools without pagination
• Flexible filtering — by category, pricing tier, featured status, or keyword
• Structured output — clean JSON ready for Airtable, Google Sheets, or your database
• Low cost — no expensive proxy bandwidth, no Playwright

Data extracted

Field	Description	Example
name	Tool name	ChatGPT
slug	FutureTools URL slug	chatgpt
description	Short description	AI chatbot by OpenAI
websiteUrl	Official website URL	https://futuretools.link/chatgpt
logoUrl	Tool logo image URL	https://...supabase.co/.../chatgpt.png
pricingTier	Pricing model	freemium
isFeatured	Featured on FutureTools	true
isMattsPick	Matt Wolfe's personal pick	false
upvotes	Community upvote count	12847
categories	Category name(s)	["Chat"]
categorySlugs	Category slug(s)	["chat"]
tags	Search tags	["chatbot", "gpt"]
createdAt	Added to FutureTools	2022-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
publishedAt	Published on FutureTools	2022-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
futuretoolsUrl	FutureTools page link	https://futuretools.io/tools/chatgpt

How much does it cost to scrape FutureTools?

This actor uses pay-per-event (PPE) pricing — you pay per AI tool extracted. There's a small flat start fee plus a per-item charge. Higher-tier Apify plans receive volume discounts.

	FREE	BRONZE	GOLD	DIAMOND
Start fee	$0.005	$0.005	$0.005	$0.005
Per tool	$0.000022	$0.000019	$0.000011	$0.0000053
100 tools	~$0.007	~$0.007	~$0.006	~$0.006
1,000 tools	~$0.027	~$0.024	~$0.016	~$0.010
All 4,347 tools	~$0.101	~$0.088	~$0.053	~$0.028

💡 Free Apify plan estimate: Apify's free plan includes $5/month. That covers ~50+ full-directory scrapes per month at no cost.

Since all data is in one HTTP response, costs are nearly flat — you pay for results delivered, not for compute time.

How to use FutureTools Scraper

Step 1: Set your filters

Open the actor in Apify Console or via API and configure:

• Search keyword — e.g. video editing to find video AI tools
• Categories — e.g. ["generative-art", "chat"] to filter by category
• Pricing tiers — e.g. ["free", "freemium"] to find free tools only
• Featured only — toggle to get only featured tools
• Matt's Picks — toggle to get Matt Wolfe's personal recommendations
• Sort by — upvotes (popular first), newest, or oldest
• Max results — limit output size or use 0 for all matching tools

Step 2: Run the actor

Click Start in Apify Console or use the API/SDK. A typical full run takes under 30 seconds.

Step 3: Download results

Results appear in the Dataset tab. Export as JSON, CSV, or Excel. Or connect to Google Sheets, Airtable, or any other tool via Apify integrations.

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
searchQuery	string	(empty)	Keyword filter — matched against name, description, and tags
categoryFilter	string[]	(all)	Category slugs to include — e.g. ["chat", "generative-art"]
pricingTierFilter	string[]	(all)	Pricing tiers to include — free, freemium, paid, open-source
featuredOnly	boolean	false	Return only featured tools
mattsPicksOnly	boolean	false	Return only Matt's Picks
sortBy	string	upvotes	Sort order: upvotes, newest, or oldest
maxResults	integer	100	Max tools to return. Use 0 for unlimited

Available category slugs

chat, generative-art, generative-code, generative-video, image-improvement, image-scanning, marketing, productivity, research, social-media, music, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, copywriting, gaming, for-fun, avatar, automation-agents, video-editing, voice-modulation, podcasting, translation, finance, self-improvement, aggregators, inspiration, prompt-guides, motion-capture

Output example

{
  "name": "Midjourney",
  "slug": "midjourney",
  "description": "AI image generation through Discord",
  "websiteUrl": "https://futuretools.link/midjourney",
  "logoUrl": "https://...supabase.co/.../midjourney.png",
  "pricingTier": "paid",
  "isFeatured": true,
  "isMattsPick": true,
  "upvotes": 18432,
  "categories": ["Generative Art"],
  "categorySlugs": ["generative-art"],
  "tags": ["image generation", "art", "discord"],
  "createdAt": "2022-07-14T00:00:00+00:00",
  "publishedAt": "2022-07-14T00:00:00+00:00",
  "futuretoolsUrl": "https://futuretools.io/tools/midjourney"
}

Tips and best practices

💡 Get the full dataset cheaply — Run with maxResults: 0 and no filters to extract all 4,347 tools. The full dataset fits in a single HTTP response.

💡 Track new tools over time — Schedule the actor weekly with sortBy: newest and maxResults: 50 to catch recent additions. Compare with previous runs using Apify datasets.

💡 Build a free-tools shortlist — Combine pricingTierFilter: ["free", "freemium"] with any category filter to find free tools in your area of interest.

💡 Export to Google Sheets — Use Apify's native Google Sheets integration to push results directly to a spreadsheet for collaborative analysis.

💡 Find Matt's top picks by category — Set mattsPicksOnly: true + a category filter to see which tools Matt Wolfe recommends in any specific category.

💡 Category slugs use hyphens — Always use lowercase hyphenated slugs like generative-art, not "Generative Art" or "generative art".

Integrations

Airtable — AI tools database

Run this actor on a schedule and push results to Airtable via Apify's Airtable integration. Build a continuously updated AI tools database your team can filter, tag, and comment on.

Google Sheets — weekly AI tools report

Schedule a Monday morning run and pipe results to Google Sheets via the Apify → Google Sheets Zap. Your team gets a fresh shortlist of the most-upvoted tools each week without manual research.

Make (Integromat) / Zapier — new tool alerts

Trigger a scenario when a run completes: filter new tools added in the last 7 days (sortBy: newest) and post them to a Slack channel or email digest. Keep your team informed without manual monitoring.

Webhook to your database

Use Apify webhooks to call your own API when a run completes. Sync the dataset into your PostgreSQL or MongoDB collection for your internal AI tool catalog.

n8n — automated competitive intelligence

Chain FutureTools Scraper with n8n's HTTP Request node to enrich tool data (website screenshots, SEO metrics) and feed a Notion database or BI dashboard.

API usage

Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('automation-lab/futuretools-scraper').call({
    categoryFilter: ['generative-art'],
    pricingTierFilter: ['free', 'freemium'],
    sortBy: 'upvotes',
    maxResults: 100,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(`Got ${items.length} AI tools`);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient(token='YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN')

run = client.actor('automation-lab/futuretools-scraper').call(
    run_input={
        'categoryFilter': ['chat'],
        'mattsPicksOnly': True,
        'sortBy': 'upvotes',
        'maxResults': 50,
    }
)

items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items
for tool in items:
    print(f"{tool['name']} ({tool['pricingTier']}) - {tool['upvotes']} upvotes")

cURL

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/automation-lab~futuretools-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "pricingTierFilter": ["free"],
    "sortBy": "newest",
    "maxResults": 200
  }'

Use with Claude and AI assistants (MCP)

FutureTools Scraper works as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool — connect it to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible AI assistant to ask questions about the AI tools landscape in natural language.

Claude Code

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/futuretools-scraper"

Claude Desktop / Cursor / VS Code

Add to your MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=automation-lab/futuretools-scraper",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

Example prompts

• "Find all free AI image generation tools on FutureTools sorted by upvotes"
• "Which Matt's Picks tools are in the productivity category?"
• "List the 10 newest generative video tools added to FutureTools"
• "Show me all freemium chatbot tools with more than 1000 upvotes"

Legality and terms of service

This actor scrapes publicly accessible data from FutureTools.io. The scraped data (tool names, descriptions, pricing tiers, categories) is factual, non-copyrightable information. No login, authentication, or rate limit circumvention is involved.

Always review FutureTools.io's Terms of Service before using scraped data commercially. Use responsibly and cache results rather than hammering the site repeatedly. Running this actor more than once per day is unnecessary — the dataset doesn't update that frequently.

This actor complies with Apify's Terms of Service and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.

FAQ

Q: Why does the actor fetch 3+ MB of HTML?
A: FutureTools.io embeds its entire tool database in the initial HTML response as React Server Components JSON. This means all 4,347 tools are available in a single HTTP request — no pagination, no JS execution, no browser needed. The 3MB size is just the embedded dataset.

Q: How many tools does FutureTools.io have?
A: As of early 2026, ~4,347 tools across 28+ categories. The actor extracts whatever is currently on the site.

Q: Can I filter by multiple categories at once?
A: Yes. Pass ["chat", "generative-art"] in categoryFilter to get tools in either category. The filter is OR-based (any match).

Q: The category filter returns 0 results — what's wrong?
A: Check that you're using the correct slug format (lowercase, hyphenated). Use chat not Chat or chatbots. See the full slug list in the Input parameters section above.

Q: Can I get just the free tools?
A: Yes — set pricingTierFilter: ["free"] for fully free tools, or ["free", "freemium"] for tools with a free tier.

Q: How often should I run this?
A: FutureTools updates a few times per week. A daily or weekly run is sufficient. For monitoring new additions, use sortBy: newest with a small maxResults to catch recent entries.

Q: Does this work without a proxy?
A: Yes. FutureTools.io does not require proxies. The actor makes a standard HTTP GET request to the homepage. No CAPTCHA, no bot detection, no residential proxy needed.

Q: The run succeeded but outputted 0 items — why?
A: Check your filters. If you combine category + pricing tier + search query, the intersection may be empty. Try relaxing one filter at a time to identify which is too restrictive.

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• GitHub Trending Scraper — trending repositories and developers

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