Product Hunt Scraper

Product Hunt Scraper

Product Hunt Scraper turns Product Hunt into a clean, machine-readable feed of launches. It returns one JSON record per product launch - "Onepin, #1 Product of the Day, 401 votes" - with the name, tagline, full description, vote and comment counts, the position on the leaderboard you asked for, the launch date, the topics, the makers and the hunter (name, username, headline, profile URL), the thumbnail, the gallery images and videos, the pricing type, the daily/weekly/monthly badges, the product's review score, the Product Hunt URL and the product's own website URL with Product Hunt's ref=producthunt and utm parameters stripped. Optionally it attaches the launch discussion: every comment thread with its replies, author, votes and date.

No account, API key or login is needed. The Actor reads the same public GraphQL endpoint the Product Hunt web app uses (www.producthunt.com/frontend/graphql), with the request shape that endpoint expects (persisted-query hash plus the XHR header). If you have an official API v2 developer token you can supply it and leaderboards, topics and products are read from api.producthunt.com/v2/api/graphql instead.

Typical uses: tracking which products launch every day for a newsletter or a Slack digest, monitoring competitors in a topic such as artificial-intelligence or developer-tools, building a lead list of makers who just launched (with their real website, not a redirect), researching how launches in a category perform (votes, comments, pricing), or pulling the discussion of a specific launch for sentiment analysis.

Four modes are supported:

• leaderboard - the daily, weekly or monthly ranking for a given date (default: today in US Pacific, Product Hunt's clock). Records carry rank.
• topic - the products listed under one or more topic slugs (artificial-intelligence, saas, marketing), ordered like the topic page (highest rated) or by most recent launch. Each record is the product's latest launch.
• search - Product Hunt's product search for a free-text query. Each record is the matching product's latest launch.
• products - specific launches or products by URL: /products/<slug> gives the product's latest launch, /posts/<slug> or /products/<slug>/launches/<launch> one specific launch.

How to scrape Product Hunt

1. Open the Actor in Apify Console and click Try for free.
2. Pick a Mode. For leaderboard choose the Period and optionally a Date (2026-10-10); for topic enter topic slugs; for search a Query; for products the Product Hunt URLs.
3. Set Max items (default 20). Turn on Include comments if you want the launch discussion (default 30 comments per product, adjustable with Max comments per product). Turn off Include makers and hunter for leaner records.
4. Leave Proxy configuration on Apify Proxy (recommended) and click Start.
5. Results appear in the Output tab within seconds and can be downloaded as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read through the API.

How the fetching works

Leaderboards are read with Product Hunt's own feed query (homefeedItems ordered by DAILY_RANK, WEEKLY_RANK or MONTHLY_RANK, 20 items per page, cursor pagination) - the exact data the leaderboard page renders, including the site's own rank. Promoted "Ad" slots that Product Hunt mixes into the feed are skipped and never charged. Topic pages use the topic's product listing (topic.products, 20 per page), search uses productSearch (page-number pagination), and products mode looks launches up by slug. Every record is built from a single Post node that already includes the product's website, makers, hunter, topics, badges and media, so there is normally one request per 20 products. Only when a launch has no website on record does the Actor follow the /r/p/<id> short link (one tiny request, explicitly allowed by Product Hunt's robots.txt) to recover it.

Comments come from the launch's thread list (30 threads per request, each with up to 10 replies) in Product Hunt's default "most relevant" order, flattened as thread, replies, next thread. isReply and parentId keep the structure.

Requests go through a shared client with a 400 ms politeness gap, at most two in flight, browser-like TLS and headers, and retries on network errors, 429 and 5xx. The client keeps one proxy session (one IP) for as long as it passes Cloudflare and rotates it only after a 403, retrying up to four times through fresh sessions; a persisting Cloudflare challenge is reported as a blocked status record with the HTTP status and body snippet, never as an empty success. Every pushed launch id is remembered in the run state so a migrated or resurrected run never charges the same product twice.

Product Hunt Scraper pricing

This Actor uses Apify's pay-per-event model. There is no subscription and no per-result platform fee on top:

• Actor start: a flat fee of $0.00005 per run.
• Product scraped: $0.0015 per product / launch pushed to your dataset ($1.50 per 1,000 products).
• Comment scraped: $0.0005 per comment attached to a pushed product (only with Include comments on).

A daily leaderboard (about 25-35 featured launches) costs around $0.05; a 100-product topic listing $0.15; a single product with 30 comments $0.0165. Status records (blocked, not found, empty, error) are free. You can cap spending with Maximum cost per run; when the cap is reached the Actor stops cleanly and keeps everything scraped so far. If the remaining budget covers only part of a product's comments, the product is pushed with the comments that were charged.

Input example

{
    "mode": "leaderboard",
    "period": "daily",
    "date": "2026-10-10",
    "maxItems": 30,
    "includeComments": false,
    "maxCommentsPerProduct": 30,
    "includeMakers": true,
    "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

Input fields

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	leaderboard / topic / search / products	leaderboard	What to scrape.
period	daily / weekly / monthly	daily	Leaderboard mode: the ranking period.
date	YYYY-MM-DD	today (US Pacific)	Leaderboard mode: the day, the ISO week containing it, or the month containing it.
topics	array of strings	-	Topic mode: topic slugs from producthunt.com/topics/<slug> (full URLs accepted).
topicOrder	highest_rated / most_recent_launch	highest_rated	Topic mode: the topic page's default order, or newest launches first.
query	string	-	Search mode: free-text product search.
productUrls	array of strings	-	Products mode: /products/<slug>, /posts/<slug> or /products/<slug>/launches/<launch> URLs, or bare product slugs.
maxItems	integer	20	Stop after this many products (across all topics / URLs).
includeComments	boolean	false	Attach the launch discussion (comments).
maxCommentsPerProduct	integer	30	Cap on comments per product, 1-500.
includeMakers	boolean	true	Attach makers and hunter.
apiToken	secret string	-	Optional official API v2 developer token; see below.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy	Standard proxy settings.

Output example

{
    "id": "1257662",
    "slug": "onepin",
    "name": "Onepin",
    "tagline": "AI voiceover with every name, price and date said right",
    "description": "AI voices sound human now. But they still guess names from the spelling, and nobody has time to listen to every line. Onepin runs on the voices you already use (ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Google, 30+ more), spells out prices and dates, checks names against a 4M-word pronunciation dictionary, scores every line, and fixes the wrong word without re-rendering the take.",
    "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/posts/onepin",
    "productSlug": "onepin",
    "productUrl": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/onepin",
    "websiteUrl": "https://onepin.ai/",
    "votesCount": 401,
    "commentsCount": 61,
    "rank": 1,
    "launchDate": "2026-10-10T07:01:00.000Z",
    "topics": ["developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence", "audio"],
    "makers": [
        {
            "name": "Soohyun Bae",
            "username": "soohyun",
            "headline": "CEO of Onepin",
            "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/@soohyun",
            "avatarUrl": "https://ph-avatars.imgix.net/4108508/original.jpeg"
        }
    ],
    "hunter": {
        "name": "Rohan Chaubey",
        "username": "rohanrecommends",
        "headline": "Top Hunter | Author | Startup Advisor",
        "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/@rohanrecommends",
        "avatarUrl": "https://ph-avatars.imgix.net/4325010/a8bdb2a7-d1ec-444a-9823-2833c30c540c.jpeg"
    },
    "thumbnailUrl": "https://ph-files.imgix.net/25268265-e582-4351-8a6e-1f94e6959d71.png?auto=format",
    "galleryUrls": ["https://ph-files.imgix.net/59e2d20a-8e04-423f-ac81-90fa2a2d6af6.png?auto=format"],
    "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijQ_XeMYz00"],
    "pricingType": "freemium",
    "badges": [
        {
            "type": "top_post",
            "position": 1,
            "period": "daily",
            "date": "2026-10-10",
            "label": "#1 Product of the Day (2026-10-10)"
        }
    ],
    "reviewsRating": 0,
    "reviewsCount": 0,
    "comments": [
        {
            "id": "5936741",
            "author": {
                "name": "Emma Pugsley",
                "username": "you_x_you_i",
                "headline": "Building a website optimizer",
                "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/@you_x_you_i",
                "avatarUrl": "https://ph-avatars.imgix.net/9810694/avatar.png"
            },
            "body": "Congratulations on the launch. ReSO AI sounds very comprehensive ...",
            "votes": 11,
            "date": "2026-10-10T07:57:08.000Z",
            "isReply": false,
            "parentId": null,
            "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/reso?comment=5936741"
        }
    ],
    "source": "frontend",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-10-11T07:12:41.000Z"
}

rank is the position on the requested leaderboard (null in other modes). pricingType is free, freemium (Product Hunt's "free options") or paid. badges lists Product of the Day/Week/Month/Year positions and Golden Kitty awards. reviewsRating and reviewsCount are the product-level review score (0-5) where the listing exposes it. comments is only present when Include comments is on. source is frontend (website, no login) or api-v2 (token).

Integrations

Connect the Actor to Google Sheets, Slack, Airtable, Make, Zapier, n8n or your own code through Apify's integrations. Schedule it daily to archive every leaderboard, or call it from an LLM agent through the Apify MCP server or the API client (apify-client for JavaScript and Python).

Sources and limitations

• Website GraphQL (default, no token). Product Hunt's web app calls www.producthunt.com/frontend/graphql without authentication; the endpoint executes persisted queries and accepts a new document when it arrives with its SHA-256 hash and the X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest header. The Actor's documents only select fields the web app itself selects, so they match the live schema. If Product Hunt changes the schema or the persisted-query policy, the run reports it precisely (blocked or error status with the server's message) instead of returning partial data. This path is working as of October 2026 but is not an official API; treat it as best effort.
• Cloudflare. The site sits behind a Cloudflare managed challenge. A browser-like TLS/header fingerprint passes it (that is how this Actor runs); plain curl does not. Through Apify Proxy roughly one datacenter session in three is challenged on its first request, which is why the client sticks to a session that passed and rotates only on a 403 (up to five attempts per request). If a run still ends with a blocked record, retry, switch to a residential proxy group, or use apiToken.
• robots.txt. /search* pages are disallowed, so the Actor never fetches them: search goes through the GraphQL productSearch field the site's own search uses. /r/p/* short links are explicitly allowed and are the only non-GraphQL requests made.
• Official API v2 (apiToken). Implemented from the published schema (posts with postedAfter/postedBefore/topic/order, post(slug), nested comments). The token path could not be exercised end to end while building this version (no token was available), so treat it as a documented, untested alternative. API v2 has no text search (search always uses the website), no product-level review score, no pricing type and no badges, and nests at most 20 comments per post; rank is the position in the vote-ordered result, not the site's badge.
• Rank and votes move. Daily boards fill in during the day (US Pacific); scraping a day before 23:59 PT gives an intermediate ranking. votesCount is the live count at scrape time.
• Search and topic records are products, each represented by its latest launch; a product with several launches appears once. A topic page lists products tagged with that topic at product level, so the launch's own topics (first 10 tags of that launch) do not always include the topic you asked for - in a 40-item artificial-intelligence run, 21 launches carried the tag themselves.

Product Hunt Scraper FAQ

Which date does the daily leaderboard use?

Product Hunt's day runs on US Pacific time; date is interpreted in that zone, and the default is today in that zone. weekly uses the ISO week (Monday to Sunday) containing the date, matching /leaderboard/weekly/<year>/<week>.

Why is websiteUrl sometimes null?

The launch has no website on record and its short link did not redirect (usually a product that is no longer online). Everything else on the record is still filled.

Can I get the Product of the Month badges for older months?

Yes - period: "monthly" with any past date. Monthly boards list a few hundred launches; raise maxItems accordingly.

How much does a full day cost?

A daily board is typically 25-35 launches, so about $0.04-0.05 without comments. With 30 comments per product, add about $0.015 per product.

What happens if Product Hunt blocks the request?

The Actor pushes a free blocked status record quoting the HTTP status and body, stops, and fails the run if nothing was collected - it never reports an empty dataset as success.

Related actors

Same author, same pay-per-event model and the same no-login approach. They combine well in one pipeline (for example calendar events plus prediction odds plus channel chatter around a release):

• Telegram Channel Scraper - posts, views, media and links from public Telegram channels, no login.
• Substack Scraper - posts, authors, likes, restacks and comments from public Substack publications, custom domains included.
• Economic Calendar Scraper - Forex Factory and Investing.com macro events with UTC times, impact, actual, forecast and previous values.
• Prediction Market Odds Scraper - Polymarket and Kalshi markets with 0-1 prices, implied probabilities, bid/ask, volume and orderbooks.

Legal and compliance

The Actor reads publicly available pages and the public endpoint behind them without logging in, keeps request rates low (two requests at a time, 400 ms apart) and respects Product Hunt's robots.txt. Scraping public data is generally legal, but you are responsible for complying with Product Hunt's Terms of Service, the API terms if you use a token, and applicable laws such as GDPR when you store personal data (maker, hunter and commenter names are personal data). Use the data for your own research, monitoring and analysis; do not republish it as a Product Hunt clone.

Support

Found a bug, need a field that is missing, or want a different output shape? Open an issue in the Actor's Issues tab in Apify Console.