Hacker News Data & API Alternative | Firehose | $0.19 / 1K

Hacker News data export: top stories, Show HN, Ask HN, jobs and comments, plus a firehose for new items

Get Hacker News data as clean rows in a table, JSON, CSV or Excel, without writing the loop yourself. This Actor reads Hacker News's own official public API (the Firebase API at hacker-news.firebaseio.com): no API key, no login, no browser, no proxy. Pick a feed (top, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs) or switch on firehose mode and get only the items that are new since your last run.

$0.19 per 1,000 rows. No start fee. A 30-story snapshot costs about half a cent.

What people use it for

• Hacker News top stories export: a snapshot of the front page (or best, new) with title, link, domain, score, author and comment count.
• Show HN launch tracking: spot new products, side projects and open-source launches the day they appear. Good for startup idea research and competitor watching.
• Ask HN research: collect questions the HN community is asking, for content ideas and market research.
• Hacker News jobs feed: the YC-backed company job posts from the jobs feed, ready to drop into a sheet or a newsletter.
• Hacker News comments dataset: top stories plus their comment threads as flat rows (parent id, story id, depth), for sentiment analysis, topic modelling or LLM and RAG datasets.
• Hacker News alerts and monitoring: run firehose mode on a schedule and push only new stories to Slack, Google Sheets or a database. The Actor itself does not do keyword matching, so filter the new rows in your workflow (Make, n8n, Zapier or your own code).
• Newsletter and content curation: feed top or best into a weekly digest.

Why use this instead of calling the Hacker News API yourself?

The official API is free and needs no key, and for a one-off lookup it is the right tool. The catch is that it returns one item per request, so a feed with comments means thousands of calls plus your own retry, concurrency and state code. This Actor adds:

• Flat, ready-to-use rows instead of nested item ids (domain, hnUrl, ISO timestamps already filled in).
• Firehose mode: "everything new since my last run", tracked for you in a key-value store in your own Apify account.
• Comment trees flattened with parentId, storyId and depth, capped per story so cost stays predictable.
• Scheduling, webhooks, API and integrations from Apify, with CSV, JSON and Excel export.

It does not search by keyword and cannot query historical data by date range. For full-text search over the whole HN archive, use Algolia's free Hacker News Search API (hn.algolia.com/api).

Firehose mode: only new Hacker News items since your last run

Every Hacker News item has a permanent, strictly increasing integer id, and the API exposes the current maximum (/v0/maxitem.json). "Everything new since my last run" is just the id range between your last mark and that ceiling, so there is no sort order to get wrong and no time-window gap.

• First run never bills your whole history. It starts firstRunLookback ids back (500 by default).
• A capped run never skips an id. If maxIdsPerRun stops a run partway, the mark advances only through the longest unbroken run of ids actually processed, even with concurrent fetching.
• Choose item types: story, job, poll, pollopt or comment. Comments are high volume, so they are off by default.
• Comments have no public score, so minScore only filters stories, jobs and polls.

The mark is stored in a key-value store in your account, per Apify user. Set stateStoreName or stateNamespace if you want separate trackers.

Input

Input	Default	Notes
mode	list	list (a feed snapshot) or changes (firehose)
listType	top	top, new, best, ask, show, job. Mode list only. Each list holds what HN publishes (up to 500 ids for top and new, fewer for the others)
itemTypes	["story"]	Which types to keep in firehose mode
includeComments	false	Mode list only. One request per comment (HN has no batch endpoint)
maxCommentsPerStory / commentDepth	50 / 5	Comment tree caps
minScore	0	Stories, jobs and polls only
maxItems	200	Cost cap, billed once per row saved
maxIdsPerRun	1000	Mode changes only. Safety cap per run
firstRunLookback	500	Mode changes only. How far back a new source starts

Example input, the current Show HN feed:

{ "mode": "list", "listType": "show", "maxItems": 30 }

Example input, firehose for new stories (schedule this hourly):

{ "mode": "changes", "itemTypes": ["story"], "maxIdsPerRun": 1000 }

Output

One row per story, job, poll or comment. Real example row (Show HN feed):

{
  "id": 50167604,
  "type": "story",
  "title": "Show HN: Penmentor – Claude marks up your handwritten math like a teacher",
  "url": "https://github.com/AbdullahAlhariri/penmentor",
  "domain": "github.com",
  "by": "abdullahalharir",
  "score": 60,
  "descendants": 7,
  "createdUtc": 1792509054,
  "createdAtIso": "2026-10-20T15:10:54.000Z",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167604",
  "listType": "show"
}

Comment rows carry text, by, parentId, storyId and depth, so a thread rebuilds from the flat table with one self-join. Rows also include deleted and dead flags.

Pricing: pay per row, worked examples

Event	Price	When
story-scraped	$0.00019	One story, job or poll row
comment-scraped	$0.00019	One comment row

Run	Rows	Cost
Top 30 stories snapshot	30	about $0.006
Default run (maxItems 200)	200	about $0.038
1,000 comments	1,000	$0.19
100,000 rows	100,000	$19

You pay only for rows saved, so maxItems is your hard cost cap. Platform usage (compute) is included in the per-row price; there is no start fee.

Integrations and scheduling

• Apify Schedules: run firehose mode every 15 minutes, hourly or daily. This is the cheapest way to build Hacker News alerts.
• Webhooks: trigger your own endpoint when a run finishes.
• Make, n8n and Zapier: push new stories to Slack, email, Notion or a CRM.
• Google Sheets: export a dataset to a sheet, or append on every run.
• API and clients (JavaScript, Python): start runs and read datasets from code. AI agents can reach it through Apify's MCP server.

FAQ

Is there a Hacker News API key? No. The official API is open, and so is this Actor.

Can I get Hacker News data without coding? Yes. Fill in the input form, run, and download the dataset as CSV, Excel or JSON.

How do I get only new Hacker News stories? Set mode to changes and schedule it. Each run returns items newer than the previous run.

Can I search Hacker News by keyword? Not with this Actor. Use Algolia's HN Search API for keyword and date-range search, or run firehose mode and filter new rows in your own workflow.

Can I scrape user profiles or the full archive? No. This Actor covers the feed lists, firehose mode and comment trees. For the whole archive, use the official API or a public dump.

Does it hit rate limits? The Hacker News API answered every request without throttling in testing, and the Actor retries with backoff on errors.

Is it legal? It reads Hacker News's own public API and stores only what each item already publishes under its public username.

What are alternatives? Other Store Actors cover Hacker News: epctex/hackernews-scraper advertises search and historical data, and automation-lab/hackernews-scraper covers the main sections. Check each page for current pricing and features.

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• Y Combinator Companies Scraper: the YC company directory as data.
• epctex/hackernews-scraper: third-party Hacker News Actor with search criteria.