Kickstarter Campaigns Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

Kickstarter has no official public API for campaign discovery — we read the site's own internal discovery endpoint and the campaign-detail payload embedded in each project page, so you get structured funding progress, backer counts, creator and location data, and (optionally) full reward-tier and add-on detail without hand-scraping the Discover page yourself.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation + cookie warmup — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes and warms cookies on the public Discover page before every session, so Kickstarter's internal endpoints see a real browser.
• 🧩 We parse Kickstarter's undocumented wire format for you — the JSON-and-unicode-escaped window.current_project payload embedded in each project page, isolated in one parser module so a format change doesn't break your pipeline.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 — up to 5 attempts, fresh session on every retry.
• 🧱 A single bad reward-tier page never drops a row — you get listing-only fields with a clear log instead of a failed run.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Competitive product-launch tracking — monitor new campaigns in your category before they hit the mainstream press.
• Crowdfunding trend-spotting — pull a category's live campaigns to see what's gaining traction and how fast.
• Market research — analyze funding goals, pledge velocity, and backer counts across a niche before launching your own campaign.
• Reward-tier benchmarking — compare pricing and reward structures across competing campaigns in the same category.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
category	string	no	'technology'	Kickstarter category slug to filter by. Leave unset to browse the unfiltered feed.
searchTerm	string	no	'—'	Free-text search query, combinable with Category. Leave empty to browse without a keyword filter.
sort	string	no	'magic'	Result ordering passed to Kickstarter's discovery endpoint. Only 'magic' is independently verified; the others follow…
maxItems	integer	no	50	Hard cap on total campaigns returned across pagination — the priced dimension.
includeRewardTiers	boolean	no	True	When true, fetches each campaign's detail page for reward tiers, add-ons, comments/updates counts, and tags. Roughly…
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': True}	Apify Proxy config. apifyProxyGroups is left unset (datacenter default) — no residential-proxy requirement observed for…

Example input

{
  "category": "technology",
  "maxItems": 3,
  "includeRewardTiers": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
campaign_id	integer	Kickstarter's own numeric project ID.
name	string	Campaign title.
blurb	['string', 'null']	One-line campaign pitch.
slug	string	Canonical URL slug for the campaign.
state	string	live / successful / failed / canceled / suspended.
goal_usd	number	Funding goal, normalized to USD.
pledged_usd	number	Amount pledged so far, normalized to USD.
percent_funded	number	Percent of goal funded; derived from pledged/goal when not present on the payload.
backers_count	integer	Number of backers.
currency	string	Campaign's native currency code.
country	string	Campaign's country code.
deadline	string	ISO-8601 campaign deadline.
created_at	string	ISO-8601 campaign creation timestamp.
launched_at	string	ISO-8601 campaign launch timestamp.
staff_pick	boolean	Whether Kickstarter staff featured this campaign.
creator_id	integer	Creator's numeric Kickstarter ID.
creator_name	string	Creator display name.
location_name	['string', 'null']	Creator/campaign location display name.
location_state	['string', 'null']	Location state/province, when disclosed.
location_country	['string', 'null']	Location country code, when disclosed.
category_id	integer	Kickstarter numeric category ID.
category_name	string	Kickstarter category name.
category_parent_name	['string', 'null']	Parent category name, when the category is a subcategory.
project_url	string	Canonical campaign detail URL.
image_url	['string', 'null']	Campaign cover photo URL.
comments_count	['integer', 'null']	Comment count from the detail page; null when reward tiers were not fetched.
updates_count	['integer', 'null']	Update-post count from the detail page; null when reward tiers were not fetched.
tags	array	Campaign tags from the detail page; empty list when not fetched.
reward_tiers	['array', 'null']	List of reward-tier objects (reward_id, title, minimum_usd, description, backers_count, estimated_delivery,…
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp when this row was recorded.

Example output

{
  "campaign_id": 1234567890,
  "name": "Nomad Drone: The Foldable 4K Explorer",
  "blurb": "A pocket-sized 4K drone that folds flat and flies for 40 minutes.",
  "slug": "nomad-drone-4k-explorer",
  "state": "live",
  "goal_usd": 25000.0,
  "pledged_usd": 41823.5,
  "percent_funded": 167.29,
  "backers_count": 612,
  "currency": "USD",
  "country": "US",
  "deadline": "2026-09-01T17:00:00Z",
  "created_at": "2026-06-10T14:22:00Z",
  "launched_at": "2026-07-05T15:00:00Z",
  "staff_pick": true,
  "creator_id": 987654321,
  "creator_name": "Nomad Aero Labs",
  "location_name": "Austin, TX",
  "location_state": "TX",
  "location_country": "US",
  "category_id": 16,
  "category_name": "Gadgets",
  "category_parent_name": "Technology",
  "project_url": "https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/987654321/nomad-drone-4k-explorer",
  "image_url": "https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/example.jpg",
  "comments_count": 214,
  "updates_count": 9,
  "tags": [
    "Editor's Pick"
  ],
  "reward_tiers": [
    {
      "reward_id": 111,
      "title": "Early Bird Nomad Drone",
      "minimum_usd": 149.0,
      "description": "One Nomad Drone at the early-bird price. Ships worldwide.",
      "backers_count": 340,
      "estimated_delivery": "2026-12-01T00:00:00Z",
      "shipping_enabled": true,
      "available": true
    }
  ],
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-02T09:15:00Z"
}

💰 Pricing

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

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.02	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-row	$0.0024	Per unique dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $2.42. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

Authenticated / backer-only data (pledge history, backer identities, private survey responses) is out of scope. Comment thread content and update post content are not scraped — only comments_count and updates_count. Non-USD currency conversion is limited to what Kickstarter's own payload already provides. Each run is a fresh snapshot; historical/time-series tracking across runs is on the buyer via scheduling.

❓ FAQ

Do I need to provide a category or search term?

No — both are optional. Leave both empty to browse Kickstarter's unfiltered, magic-sorted campaign feed.

What does includeRewardTiers add?

It fetches each campaign's own project page for reward_tiers, add-ons, comments_count, updates_count, and tags. It roughly doubles request volume, so turn it off if you only need funding-progress fields.

Is percent_funded always present?

Kickstarter doesn't always include it in the listing payload — when it's missing we derive it as pledged / goal * 100.

Can I get backer identities or pledge history?

No — that data requires an authenticated backer session and is out of scope. This Actor only reads Kickstarter's public campaign data.

💬 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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