Stack Overflow Scraper — incremental, no API key needed

Give it a tag, a keyword, or both, and get questions and answers back — no login, no browser. Turn on incremental mode and every run after the first returns only what's new since the previous one, filtered server-side by Stack Exchange's own API.

$0.60 per 1,000 rows. No start fee. The top-ranked competing Stack Overflow Actor on the Store charges $3.50–5.00 per 1,000 — this reads the same official public API, with nothing extra behind it that costs more to run.

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What you get

One row per question:

questionId, title, bodyHtml, tags	the question and its full body
score, viewCount, answerCount, isAnswered	how it did
ownerName, ownerUserId, ownerReputation	who asked
createdUtc, createdAtIso, link	exact time and a direct link

Turn on Also scrape answers and every answer becomes its own row with answerId, questionId, bodyHtml, score, isAccepted and its own owner fields — fetched in batches of up to 100 questions per request, not one request per answer.

Incremental mode: simpler here than anywhere else in this developer's portfolio

Every other incremental Actor here (Reddit, LinkedIn Jobs) has to implement its own "stop paging once you reach ground you've already covered" logic, because the underlying site gives no built-in way to ask for only-what's-new. Stack Exchange's API is different: it accepts a fromdate parameter and filters server-side. So mode: "changes" here is not a heuristic - it is literally asking the API for exactly what changed, and the API answers exactly that.

• First run never bills your whole tag's history. It seeds from firstRunSince (30 days by default) rather than the beginning of the tag's archive. Pass "all" for a deliberate backfill.
• The mark advances only from what this run actually emitted, and always advances even on a capped run - the same rule this developer's Reddit Actor learned the hard way (a mark that only advances on an uncapped run can end up never advancing at all for a busy source).

The API quota, and why an API key is optional but useful

Stack Exchange gives every anonymous caller a shared 300-requests/day quota. Since each request here can return up to 100 rows, that is a lot of rows before it matters - but if you run this Actor often or on many tags, register a free key at stackapps.com (instant, no approval wait) and paste it into Stack Apps API key: the same account's quota jumps to 10,000 requests/day.

Input at a glance

Input	Default	Notes
tags	—	AND-matched; leave empty to use query alone or pull the unfiltered firehose
query	—	full-text search, combinable with tags
mode	all	all or changes
sort	creation	all mode only; changes mode always uses creation
includeAnswers	false	batched, up to 100 questions per request
minScore	0	drops questions and answers scoring below this
maxItems	200	cost cap — billed once per row saved
firstRunSince	30 days	changes mode only
apiKey	—	optional, see above

Billing

Pay per event, charged once per row saved, no start fee:

Event	Price	When
question-scraped	$0.0006	one question row
answer-scraped	$0.0006	one answer row

Set maxItems as your cost cap.