ProductHunt Scraper - Web Scraping, Startup Intelligence, Product Discovery

Web scraping tool for extracting Product Hunt products, makers, comments, and daily rankings. Data extraction includes launch dates, vote counts, topics, thumbnails, maker profiles, and community engagement metrics. Built for startup competitive intelligence, product trend analysis, and founder research.

Use Cases

• Startup Competitive Intelligence: Monitor competitor products, track launch timing, and analyze vote counts as a proxy for market validation. Understand what types of products resonate with the Product Hunt community.

• Product Trend Discovery: Identify emerging product categories by analyzing daily and weekly Product Hunt rankings and topic distributions. Spot trends before they go mainstream.

• Founder Research: Profile maker backgrounds, analyze their previous launches, and build warm outreach lists for partnerships, investments, or collaborations. Understand who is building and what they have shipped before.

• SaaS Market Analysis: Track productivity, AI, and developer tool launches to inform product roadmap and positioning decisions. Monitor your competitive landscape on a curated launching platform.

• Lead Generation: Build targeted lead lists from product launches, identifying companies that may need complementary services. Follow the trail of newly funded and launched products.

MCP Tools Reference

This actor exposes the following tools via the Apify MCP protocol. AI agents can invoke these tools directly to integrate with workflows:

Tool	Input	Output
scrapeDaily	date, topic, maxProducts	Today's featured products with metadata
scrapeProducts	Product URLs array, includeComments	Individual product details and specs
scrapeMakers	Maker profile URLs	Maker bio, social links, product history
scrapeTopics	Topic/category name, maxProducts	Products filtered by category
scrapeComments	Product URL	All comments with author and votes

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
mode	string	daily, products, makers, topics	daily
urls	array	ProductHunt URLs (product pages, maker profiles)	-
date	string	Date filter (YYYY-MM-DD) for daily mode	-
topic	string	Category filter (e.g., ai, productivity, design)	-
includeComments	boolean	Extract product comments	false
maxProducts	integer	Maximum products to extract (1-1000)	50
enableBusinessIntelligence	boolean	Generate lead scores and business insights	false
proxyType	string	DATACENTER (Standard) or RESIDENTIAL (Premium)	DATACENTER

Pricing

This actor uses Apify's Pay-Per-Event (PPE) pricing model. You are charged per successful result returned. No charge for queries that return zero results.

• Standard Proxy: $0.60–$7 per IP address. Product Hunt has moderate anti-bot protection; standard datacenter proxy is sufficient for most use cases.

• Premium Residential Proxy: $7–$8 per GB. Use for high-volume scheduled scraping where datacenter IPs may be rate limited.

• Compute Units: Consumed from your Apify plan based on run time and memory allocation.

Example Output

{
  "results": [
    {
      "type": "product",
      "id": "prod_abc123",
      "name": "Cursor AI",
      "tagline": "The AI-first code editor",
      "description": "Cursor is the AI-first code editor built for pair programming with AI",
      "url": "https://producthunt.com/posts/cursor-ai",
      "websiteUrl": "https://cursor.sh",
      "votesCount": 3847,
      "commentsCount": 342,
      "topics": ["ai", "developer-tools", "software"],
      "thumbnail": "https://producthunt.com/photos/cursor_ai_thumb.jpg",
      "makers": [
        {
          "name": "Aman Ranger",
          "url": "https://producthunt.com/@amanranger",
          "makerSince": "2023"
        }
      ],
      "launchDate": "2026-04-10",
      "scrapedAt": "2026-04-11T10:00:00.000Z"
    }
  ]
}

Quick Start

# Run via Apify CLI
apify run -a red.cars/producthunt-scraper

# Or configure input and run at:
# https://apify.com/red.cars/producthunt-scraper

How It Works

The actor uses intelligent extraction with Apify's proxy infrastructure to gather public data from Product Hunt. It handles authentication states, pagination through multiple ranking pages, and error recovery automatically.

The extraction process:

1. Fetches Product Hunt daily page or specific product/maker URLs
2. Parses HTML to extract product names, descriptions, vote counts, and maker information
3. Optionally fetches comments and additional product details
4. Returns structured JSON data with all product and maker information

Data Fields Returned

Product Results:

• type — Always "product" for product scrapes
• name, tagline, description — Product identifiers and pitch
• url, websiteUrl — Links to Product Hunt and external website
• votesCount, commentsCount — Community engagement metrics
• topics — Category tags (ai, productivity, design, etc.)
• thumbnail — Product image URL
• makers — Array of maker profiles with names and PH profile URLs
• launchDate — Date featured on Product Hunt

Maker Profile Results:

• name — Maker display name
• url — Product Hunt profile URL
• makerSince — Year joined Product Hunt
• products — Array of products they've launched

Known Limitations

• Product Hunt may rate-limit repeated requests from the same IP address; use residential proxy for scheduled scraping
• Historical data beyond current week's rankings is limited; Product Hunt archives are not comprehensive
• Some product websites may be offline or redirected since launch
• Comments may be limited for very old or low-engagement products
• Vote counts reflect a point-in-time snapshot

Legal

Data source is Product Hunt. This actor must be used in compliance with Product Hunt's Terms of Service. Do not use for unauthorized data collection, spam, or privacy-violating activities.