Scholarship Scraper (bold.org)

⚠️ Known issue — temporarily unable to return data (as of 2026-09-20)

bold.org has switched its entire site to Vercel's "Security Checkpoint" bot protection, which answers every non-browser request with HTTP 429 and a JavaScript challenge page — including robots.txt and sitemap.xml. Verified from four independent networks, so no input, proxy or retry setting works around it.

Runs fail immediately with that explanation and cost you nothing — this Actor bills per scholarship returned, and a blocked run returns none. We re-check the site every night and will remove this notice the moment it clears. Everything documented below is unchanged and works as soon as bold.org is reachable again.

Scrape scholarship listings from bold.org — the largest single scholarship platform — into JSON, CSV or Excel. No login, no browser, no proxy.

Every row is a complete scholarship: award amount, number of awards, deadline, essay prompt, judging criteria, education levels, donor, and the number of people who have already applied — plus a computed applicantsPerAward ratio so you can see at a glance which awards are actually winnable.

Pay per result: $0.00035 per scholarship. No start fee — a run that returns nothing costs nothing, and scholarships removed by your filters are never charged.

What you can do with it

• Build a scholarship feed for a school, newsletter or app — crawl by-major, by-state, by-type and by-demographics categories and get a de-duplicated list.
• Find the winnable ones — sort your dataset by applicantsPerAward; a $1,000 award with 40 applicants beats a $10,000 award with 12,000.
• "Closing this month" lists — set deadlineBefore to the end of the month and openOnly: true.
• Filter by money — minAwardAmount: 5000 keeps only the serious awards.
• Search by topic — searchQuery: "nursing" finds the matching categories for you, so you do not have to know bold.org's category slugs.
• Prep essays in bulk — essayTopic gives the actual essay question(s) as plain text, with essayMinLength / essayMaxLength.
• Segment by audience — educationLevels: ["highschool"] for graduating seniors, ["graduate"] for grad students.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
categoryTypes	array	["by-major"]	Which category families to crawl: by-major, by-state, by-type, by-demographics, by-year
maxCategoryPages	integer	20	How many category pages to fetch (≈30 scholarships each)
maxResults	integer	200	Hard cap on rows returned — also your cost cap
startUrls	array	—	Specific bold.org category or individual scholarship URLs, instead of sitemap discovery
searchQuery	string	—	Free-text filter, e.g. nursing or first generation. Every word must appear in the name, description, category, slug or criteria (the word "scholarship" is ignored). Also crawls matching category pages first
openOnly	boolean	true	Drop scholarships whose deadline has passed (rolling deadlines are always kept)
minAwardAmount	integer	—	Minimum single-award size in USD
deadlineAfter	string	—	Only deadlines on/after this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
deadlineBefore	string	—	Only deadlines on/before this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
educationLevels	array	—	highschool, undergraduate, graduate
includeEssayPrompt	boolean	true	Include the essay question(s) as plain text

Example input

{
  "categoryTypes": ["by-major", "by-type"],
  "maxCategoryPages": 10,
  "maxResults": 200,
  "minAwardAmount": 1000,
  "deadlineBefore": "2026-12-31",
  "educationLevels": ["highschool"]
}

Sample output

{
  "name": "Pamela Branchini Memorial Scholarship",
  "slug": "pamela-branchini-memorial-scholarship",
  "url": "https://bold.org/scholarships/pamela-branchini-memorial-scholarship/",
  "description": "This scholarship seeks to honor the life of Pamela Branchini by supporting students who are pursuing degrees in the fine arts.",
  "category": "Arts",
  "deadline": "2026-11-05T23:59:59Z",
  "isRollingDeadline": false,
  "announcementDate": "2026-12-06T00:00:00.000Z",
  "awardAmount": 1000,
  "awardAmounts": [1000, 1000],
  "totalAwardAmount": 2000,
  "numberOfAwards": 2,
  "numberOfApplicants": 665,
  "applicantsPerAward": 332.5,
  "educationLevels": ["highSchool", "undergraduate", "graduate"],
  "acceptsHighSchool": true,
  "criteria": ["Ambition", "Need", "Boldest Bold.org Profile"],
  "requiresEssay": true,
  "essayTopic": "Tell us about a piece of art you made and what it means to you.",
  "essayMinLength": 400,
  "essayMaxLength": 600,
  "isMultiYear": false,
  "featured": false,
  "donorName": "Dan Branchini and the Glitter Team at Community Lutheran",
  "donorProfileUrl": "https://bold.org/profile/bruce-ewing/",
  "donorVerified": false,
  "imageUrl": "https://static.bold.org/pamelabranchinimemorialscholarship....jpeg",
  "winnersCount": 0,
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-06T19:31:45.646Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-09-10T00:40:38.001Z",
  "sourceUrl": "https://bold.org/scholarships/by-major/art-scholarships/",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-10T10:21:03.552Z"
}

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.00035 per scholarship, no start fee — a run that returns nothing costs nothing, and scholarships removed by your filters are never charged.

Pricing verified live 2026-10-02 against the whole niche, not just one rival: an 11-term Store sweep for "scholarship" surfaces 22 comparable listings. The one direct bold.org competitor, jungle_synthesizer/bold-org-scholarship-database-scraper (3 users, dormant — 0 new users in 30 days), charges a $0.10 Actor-start fee plus $0.001 per record — 2.9x our per-row rate before the start fee is even added, so we are cheaper at every run size and from the first row. Its 10-field output (name, amount, deadline, education level, field of study, eligibility summary, category, sponsor, applicant count, no-essay flag) matches the "about 11 fields, no essay text" shape described above — it does not carry judging criteria, numberOfAwards, applicantsPerAward, donorVerified or winnersCount.

The niche's biggest generic scholarship scraper, majestic_fund/the-scholarship-scraper-actor (71 users, 7 new in the last 30 days — the most active listing we found), ties our exact $0.00035 per-record rate but adds a $0.0005 Actor-start fee on top, so we are cheaper on every run regardless of size. It scrapes "multiple scholarship databases and platforms" per its own listing; we could not confirm bold.org is one of them, so treat it as a possible substitute, not a verified bold.org alternative.

What we do not claim: we are not the cheapest listing in the scholarship niche. fiery_dream/scholarship-intel (39 users) charges $0.00005 Actor-start plus $0.00001 per result — about 35x cheaper than our rate, undercutting us from the first row (a 100-row pull costs roughly $0.0011 there against $0.035 here). It is a student-facing scholarship matcher, not a bold.org feed: its inputs are GPA, degree level, field of study and first-generation status, it is not scoped to bold.org or any single site, and it cannot return bold.org's per-listing depth (essay prompt text, judging criteria, applicantsPerAward, donor fields). Price-shop on the feature list and the site you actually need, not the headline rate alone.

FAQ

Do I need a proxy or a browser? No. bold.org ships the full scholarship records inside the initial HTML response, so this Actor is plain HTTP — fast, cheap and it runs fine on the smallest memory setting.

How many scholarships can I get? One category page yields about 30 complete records in a single request, and there are 500+ category pages across the five category families. Raise maxCategoryPages and maxResults together; results are de-duplicated by scholarship ID across categories, so overlapping categories never bill you twice for the same scholarship.

Why did I get fewer rows than maxResults? Either the crawl ran out of category pages (raise maxCategoryPages), or your filters removed them. The log prints how many records were found and how many survived filtering on every page. Filtered-out records are not charged.

What is applicantsPerAward? numberOfApplicants / numberOfAwards, rounded to one decimal — bold.org publishes the live applicant count, so this is a real competitiveness signal, not an estimate. It is null when either number is unavailable.

Is the data live? Yes, each run fetches the pages fresh. updatedAt is bold.org's own last-modified timestamp for the scholarship, and scrapedAt is when we read it.

Is this allowed? Only public pages are read, and only paths that bold.org's robots.txt permits — it disallows query-string URLs (Disallow: /*?*), so this Actor never requests one. No login, no personal data about applicants: the applicant count is a public number on the listing page.

How does this compare to other bold.org scrapers? Depth. This Actor returns 32 typed fields per scholarship — including numberOfAwards, numberOfApplicants, applicantsPerAward, the essay prompt(s), judging criteria, donor (with donorVerified) and winnersCount — versus the 11 fields typical of other bold.org Actors, where amount is usually a plain string with no award-count or applicant data at all. All four filters (searchQuery, minAwardAmount, deadlineAfter/deadlineBefore, educationLevels) are verified against real runs: each one measurably changes which rows come back, not just a passthrough flag.

Can I scrape one specific scholarship? Yes — put its page URL in startUrls, e.g. https://bold.org/scholarships/chris-jackson-scholarship/.

Does searchQuery handle accented names correctly? Yes. A name like José or María is kept as one search token instead of being split on the accented letter — matters if you're searching a scholarship named after a person.

Related guides

Engineering write-ups behind this Actor:

• Next.js App Router ships your whole database table in the HTML — bold.org's RSC flight stream, decoded
• Four ways an invisible character makes a scraper return zero rows

More tools: fetchsmith.com/tools

Source code: https://github.com/Fetchsmith/fetchsmith/tree/main/actors/scholarship-scraper