Kickstarter Project Funding Tracker

Scrapes a Kickstarter project's funding data — pledged, goal, backers, category — plus a derived funding-velocity signal. No login, no API key.

Useful for crowdfunding market research, tracking a specific campaign's momentum, and competitive analysis for creators launching a similar project.

What makes this different

funding_velocity_per_day — the number that actually tells you if a campaign is working. A raw pledged total or a percent-funded snapshot can't distinguish a project at 80% funded on day 2 of a 30-day campaign from one at 80% funded on day 29 — the first is a runaway hit, the second just squeaked by. This Actor divides total pledged by days elapsed since launch (capped at the deadline for finished campaigns), giving one number that reads as genuine momentum rather than a static snapshot.

days_remaining for live campaigns. Computed at scrape time, so filtering "campaigns ending soon" is a column, not manual date arithmetic against a raw deadline timestamp.

A genuinely nasty encoding bug, found and fixed. Kickstarter's own project page double-escapes backslashes inside the embedded JSON before HTML-encoding it, so an escaped quote inside a codec string like codecs="avc1..." arrives as an invalid two-character sequence instead of a single valid JSON escape. Parsing it directly fails partway through with a misleading "expecting ',' delimiter" error nowhere near the actual problem. This Actor corrects that extra escaping before parsing, which is the difference between a project that parses cleanly and one that silently fails on any project whose video happens to trip the bug.

Input

Field	Type	Notes
projects	array	Full Kickstarter project URLs, or creator-slug/project-slug paths.
proxyConfiguration	object	Defaults to Residential.

Output

{
  "project_id": "kickstarter.com:1955357092",
  "name": "Exploding Kittens",
  "state": "successful",
  "goal": 10000.0,
  "pledged": 8782571.99,
  "percent_funded": 87825.72,
  "backers_count": 219382,
  "funding_velocity_per_day": 289567.16,
  "days_since_launch": 30.33,
  "category_name": "Tabletop Games",
  "url": "https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elanlee/exploding-kittens"
}

A project that's been removed, suspended, or never existed fails with a clear message rather than returning an empty row. Each run also writes a RUN_COVERAGE record to the key-value store with what was requested, what came back, and any per-project failures.

Local development

pip install -r requirements.txt
python test_local.py https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exploding-kittens/exploding-kittens --out sample_output.json
python test_local.py elanlee/exploding-kittens

sample_output.json is real output from a live run.