Hacker News Scraper: Stories, Comments, Ask HN and Show HN

Search Hacker News by keyword, type, author, points and date, and get clean, structured stories and comments. Unlike most tools, newest-first searches keep going past the usual 1,000-result limit.

What it does

• Searches stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN, polls, jobs or the current front page.
• Filters by minimum points, minimum comments, date range and author.
• Sorts by newest first or by relevance.
• Returns clean text: HTML and entities in comments are converted to plain text, and links are kept.
• Adds the Hacker News link and the linked site's domain to every story.

Who it's for

• Founders and marketers tracking mentions of their product or competitors.
• Developer relations and recruiters finding active people and discussions.
• Researchers and AI pipelines collecting tech discussion data over time.

Input

Field	What to enter
Search terms	Keywords, one per line (empty = newest or top items)
Type	Stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN, polls, jobs, front page
Sort by	Newest first or most relevant
Maximum results per search	Up to 50,000
Minimum points / comments	Optional thresholds
From / to date	Optional date range
Author	Optional username

{ "searchTerms": ["postgres", "sqlite"], "type": "story", "minPoints": 100, "dateFrom": "2026-01-01" }

Output

{
  "search": "postgres", "id": "45678901", "type": "story",
  "title": "Postgres 19 released", "url": "https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/", "domain": "postgresql.org",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45678901",
  "author": "someone", "points": 512, "comments": 203, "createdAt": "2026-09-25T14:03:00Z",
  "text": null, "isAskHn": false, "isShowHn": false
}

Comments include text, storyId, parentId and the parent story's title.

Pricing

Event	When it is charged	Price per 1,000 (Free / Bronze / Silver / Gold plan)
Search run	Each request for up to 1,000 results (most searches need one), once per started 1 MB, including searches with no results.	$1 on every plan
Result scraped	Each story or comment returned in the dataset.	$0.50 / $0.45 / $0.40 / $0.35

Example: 5 searches returning 1,000 results each on the Free plan costs 5 × $0.001 + 5,000 × $0.0005 = $2.51.

Notes and limits

• Data comes from the public Hacker News search API (by Algolia), which is usually up to date within minutes.
• Sorting by relevance stops at about 1,000 results per search; use newest first for more.
• Points and comment counts are as they stand when the run happens.