Product Hunt Scraper — Launch Feed & Metadata

Collect product launches from Product Hunt without an API key. The reliable default path reads Product Hunt's official Atom feed and returns launch names, taglines, Product Hunt URLs, published dates, and feed-author names. Page and frontend-data fallbacks can add upvotes, topics, descriptions, external URLs, thumbnails, and comments when Product Hunt permits public page access.

The official feed path is HTTP-only, bounded, and does not require a proxy. Product Hunt's richer pages are a React application protected by Cloudflare, so those optional paths use Playwright and may require a residential proxy.

Why Use This Actor

Product Hunt publishes an official Atom feed but reserves engagement fields for its pages and authenticated API. This actor uses the feed first, then attempts bounded public page/frontend strategies only when the requested mode or fields need them.

Feature	This Actor	PH GraphQL API	Manual Export
API key required	No	Yes (OAuth)	No
Feed windows	Current feed, last 7 days, current month	Build yourself	Manual only
Topic browsing	Page fallback when accessible	Partial	No
Search	Feed text filtering, then page fallback	Yes	No
Comments	When frontend data is available	Yes	No
Scheduled runs	Yes (Apify)	Build yourself	No
Access terms	Feed intended for public subscription	Authentication and Product Hunt permission terms apply	Browser access

How to Use

Zero-config — collect the current official-feed snapshot:

{
    "mode": "today"
}

Search for AI products:

{
    "mode": "search",
    "searchQuery": "AI writing assistant",
    "maxProducts": 30
}

Browse a topic page:

{
    "mode": "topic",
    "topic": "developer-tools",
    "maxProducts": 100
}

Monthly official-feed watchlist:

{
    "mode": "month",
    "maxProducts": 5,
    "includeComments": false
}

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	"today"	today reads the current official feed; week and month filter it by published date; search filters feed text before page fallback; topic uses the page path
searchQuery	string	""	Search terms — required when mode is "search"
topic	string	"artificial-intelligence"	Topic slug — used when mode is "topic"
maxProducts	integer	1	Maximum number of products to return (1-1000)
includeComments	boolean	false	Prioritize the frontend data strategy and include comments when that endpoint is available
requestTimeout	integer	60000	Page load timeout in milliseconds (5000–300000)
proxyConfiguration	object	Disabled	Optional proxy settings for richer page, topic, or frontend-data fallback paths

Topic Slug Examples

Use the slug from Product Hunt topic URLs (/topics/<slug>):

• artificial-intelligence
• developer-tools
• productivity
• design-tools
• marketing
• no-code
• saas

Proxy Requirements

The official Atom-feed path does not require a proxy. Product Hunt's richer page, topic, and frontend-data paths use Cloudflare protection and may require residential access.

• Default feed use: Leave proxy use disabled.
• Richer optional fields or topic pages: Enable an available residential proxy or provide your own proxy URL.
• If every bounded strategy is blocked or empty, the actor records a diagnostic and fails the run instead of reporting an empty success.

If the official feed does not cover the requested mode and page fallbacks are blocked, the actor does not bypass the challenge or invent rows.

Output Format

Each record in the dataset represents one product launch:

{
    "name": "Notion AI",
    "tagline": "The AI workspace that works for you",
    "description": "Notion AI helps you write, edit, summarize...",
    "url": "https://notion.so",
    "productHuntUrl": "https://www.producthunt.com/posts/notion-ai",
    "upvotes": null,
    "commentsCount": null,
    "topics": [],
    "makers": [
        { "name": "Ivan Zhao", "url": null }
    ],
    "thumbnail": null,
    "launchDate": "2024-01-15",
    "isFeatured": null,
    "rating": null,
    "comments": null,
    "extractedAt": "2026-03-11T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Official-feed rows keep unavailable engagement and enrichment fields as null or empty arrays; they are never reported as zero. When includeComments is true, the actor still returns a useful feed row if available and records that the feed does not expose comments. If the richer frontend strategy succeeds, comments contains comment objects with author, body, upvotes, createdAt, and nested replies.

Use Cases

Competitive intelligence — Monitor when competitors or adjacent products launch on Product Hunt. Schedule daily runs to catch new launches as they happen and alert your team via Apify webhooks to Slack or email.

Launch monitoring — Track official-feed names, taglines, authors, links, and dates for a bounded product-research watchlist.

Market research — Compare names and positioning across the current feed, last seven days, or current month. Treat engagement fields as optional enrichment rather than guaranteed feed data.

Content monitoring — Track how products in your space are described and positioned. Extract taglines and descriptions to analyze messaging patterns and gaps in the market.

Investor deal flow — Product Hunt is a signal for early-stage launches. Use weekly and monthly feed windows to surface products for further diligence without treating unavailable feed engagement as zero.

Related Actors

• Hacker News Scraper — Scrape HN stories, comments, and user profiles
• Reddit Scraper — Scrape Reddit posts and comments from any subreddit
• RAG Web Extractor — Extract clean markdown from any URL for LLM pipelines

Pricing

This actor uses Pay-Per-Event (PPE) pricing: $5.20 per 1,000 products scraped ($0.0052 per product-scraped event). Apify platform usage follows the live Store pricing entry.

FAQ

How current is the data?

The actor fetches Product Hunt's official Atom feed live each time it runs. today means the current feed snapshot; week and month filter feed entries by their published timestamps.

Does this work without a proxy?

Yes for the official-feed path, which is the default. A residential proxy is optional for page-derived engagement fields and topic-page access. If the feed cannot satisfy an input and every page strategy is blocked or empty, the run fails honestly instead of inventing product rows.

Why does including comments make runs slower?

Comments require additional frontend data requests and can make runs materially slower. Keep maxProducts small when enabling comments, and expect comments: null if Product Hunt does not expose the richer frontend response for that run.

What happens if Product Hunt updates their frontend?

Product Hunt uses React with CSS module class names that can change. This actor uses multiple fallback selectors for each data field and gracefully degrades when a selector stops working — returning null for optional fields rather than failing. If a significant layout change breaks extraction, the actor will be updated.

Can I scrape historical leaderboards?

The current input supports the current official feed, a rolling seven-day feed window, and the current UTC month's feed entries. It does not promise a complete historical archive or final leaderboard rankings from the feed.