Hacker News Scraper – Stories, Comments & Search

Scrape Hacker News via the Algolia API: search stories & comments by keyword, points and date; grab the front page, a user's history or a full comment thread. As JSON, CSV or Excel. Free, no key.

💵 Pricing

Pay per result — $0.0005 per item. No subscription, no proxy needed. You only pay for the data you scrape, and new Apify accounts include free monthly credits so you can test it for $0.

🔎 What can it extract?

• Title, URL, points, comment count, author
• Story text / comment text (HTML-stripped)
• Created date + HN permalink
• Full comment threads (flattened)
• Search by tags: story, Show HN, Ask HN, comment

🚀 How do I use it?

1. Click Try for free.
2. Set the input (see example below).
3. Click Start and download results as JSON, CSV or Excel — or pull them via the API / schedule them.

⚙️ Input example

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "AI agents",
  "tags": "story",
  "minPoints": 100,
  "maxItems": 100
}

📦 Output example

{
  "title": "An AI agent published a hit piece on me",
  "points": 2346,
  "num_comments": 951,
  "author": "scottshambaugh",
  "type": "story"
}

🎯 Use cases

• Tech sentiment & trend tracking
• Launch & competitor monitoring
• Building tech-news datasets
• AI/RAG over discussions

💰 How much will it cost?

You pay only the per-result price (no proxy cost): 100 → ~$0.05 · 1,000 → ~$0 · 10,000 → ~$5

🆚 Why this one

Feature	This actor	Others
Front page + user + full threads	✅	search only
Min-points filter	✅	❌
No key needed	✅	sometimes

🔗 Related actors

• Devto Scraper — dev articles
• Github Scraper — repos
• Google News Scraper — news
• Npm Package Scraper — packages

❓ FAQ

Key/proxy? No. How far back? All of HN. Threads? Use mode=item with IDs.

🛟 Support

Found a bug or need an extra field? Open an issue on the actor — fixes and new fields ship fast.

Legal & privacy

Public HN content via the official Algolia API.

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Keywords: hacker news scraper, hn api, ycombinator, tech news, comments, sentiment, JSON CSV Excel