Kickstarter Scraper

Pull crowdfunding projects from Kickstarter at scale — funding goals, amount pledged (native currency and USD), backer counts, percent funded, days left, creator, category, location, and exact launch and deadline timestamps for every campaign. Built for crowdfunding marketers, product scouts, and investment analysts who need a clean, structured dataset of live and successful campaigns without clicking through the Discover feed one page at a time.

Why This Scraper?

• 30 data points per project in one flat row — funding goal, pledged (native + USD), backers, percent funded, days left, creator, category, location, currency, and timestamps, all without descending into per-project comment or backer pages.
• Native and USD pledge amounts side by side — pledged in the project's own currency plus usdPledged converted to dollars, so you can compare a £-, €-, and $-funded campaign on one axis.
• 15 Kickstarter categories as a dropdown — Art, Comics, Crafts, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film & Video, Food, Games, Journalism, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, and Theater. No typos, no guessing category slugs.
• 5 sort modes including Most Funded — Magic, Popularity, Newest, Ending Soon, and Most Funded, so you can rank by total raised or surface campaigns about to close.
• Funding-velocity signals built in — percentFunded and daysLeft on every row let you spot overfunded breakouts (above 100%) and last-minute closers in the same pull.
• Staff Picks filter — restrict to Kickstarter's editor-curated highlights to study what the platform itself promotes.
• Live, successful, or all states — pull only campaigns currently raising money, only fully-funded winners, or everything in one run.
• Location targeting by city, state, or country — type "Berlin", "California", or "Canada" and the actor resolves it to Kickstarter's place filter for you.
• Paste any Discover URL — drop a fully-filtered Kickstarter Discover link and it's scraped exactly as built, covering any combination the site's UI exposes.

Use Cases

Market Research

• Size a niche by category, then rank campaigns by total USD pledged
• Track how many projects in a category reach 100% funded versus stall out
• Map crowdfunding demand by city, state, or country
• Benchmark funding goals against what backers actually pledge

Product Scouting

• Surface new physical products in Design, Technology, and Games before they hit retail
• Find overfunded campaigns (percent funded well above 100%) signaling proven demand
• Spot Staff-Picked projects as editorially-vetted early signals
• Watch newest launches to catch trends as they start

Competitive Intelligence

• Monitor a competitor's category for new and live campaigns
• Compare backer counts and pledge totals across rival projects
• Track creator output by following a creator's category and location
• Build a watchlist of campaigns ending soon to study final-stretch behavior

Investment & Trend Analysis

• Study what wins by pulling successful, most-funded campaigns at scale
• Correlate funding velocity (percent funded vs. days left) with final outcomes
• Identify breakout categories by aggregating pledge totals over time
• Feed live campaign metrics into deal-flow and diligence pipelines

Getting Started

Search by Keyword

The simplest start — one keyword and a result cap:

{
    "searchTerms": ["board game"],
    "maxResults": 100
}

Keyword + Category + Sort

Find the most-funded tabletop games:

{
    "searchTerms": ["board game"],
    "category": "games",
    "sort": "most_funded",
    "maxResults": 200
}

Full Multi-Filter Search

Successful, Staff-Picked design projects out of Berlin, ranked by total raised:

{
    "searchTerms": ["furniture", "lamp"],
    "category": "design",
    "state": "successful",
    "sort": "most_funded",
    "staffPicks": true,
    "location": "Berlin",
    "maxResults": 500
}

Paste a Discover URL

Scrape any pre-built Kickstarter Discover or search page directly:

{
    "startUrls": ["https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/games?sort=end_date&state=live"],
    "maxResults": 300
}

Input Reference

What to Scrape

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
searchTerms	array	["board game"]	Keywords to search across Kickstarter. Each keyword runs independently and respects the filters below. Leave empty to browse the full Discover feed.
startUrls	array	[]	Paste Kickstarter Discover or search URLs directly. Each URL is scraped as-is and ignores the filters below.

Filters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
category	string	(all)	Limit results to one of 15 Kickstarter categories: Art, Comics, Crafts, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film & Video, Food, Games, Journalism, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, Theater. Leave empty for all categories.
state	string	all	Funding status: All projects, Live (currently funding), or Successful (fully funded).
sort	string	magic	Result ordering: Magic (recommended), Popularity, Newest, Ending soon, or Most funded.
staffPicks	boolean	false	Only include projects featured as Kickstarter Staff Picks (editor-curated highlights).
location	string	(worldwide)	Limit to a place — a city, state, or country name (e.g. "Berlin", "California", "Canada"). Leave empty for worldwide.

Limits

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxResults	integer	100	Maximum projects to collect across all keywords and URLs. Set to 0 for unlimited. Kickstarter limits how deep its Discover feed can be paged, so each keyword or URL returns up to about 2,500 projects — use filters to reach deeper. Each project is one billed result.

Output

Every run returns one flat row per project. Example record:

{
    "projectId": 1234567890,
    "slug": "the-best-board-game-ever",
    "title": "The Best Board Game Ever",
    "blurb": "A fast, tactical board game for 2-5 players.",
    "state": "live",
    "url": "https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamestudio/the-best-board-game-ever",
    "rewardsUrl": "https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamestudio/the-best-board-game-ever/rewards",
    "imageUrl": "https://i.kickstarter.com/assets/044/cover.jpg",
    "creator": "Game Studio",
    "creatorId": 987654321,
    "creatorSlug": "gamestudio",
    "category": "Tabletop Games",
    "categoryId": 34,
    "parentCategory": "Games",
    "country": "US",
    "location": "Portland, OR",
    "currency": "USD",
    "currencySymbol": "$",
    "fundingGoal": 25000.0,
    "pledged": 142380.0,
    "usdPledged": 142380.0,
    "backers": 3104,
    "percentFunded": 569.52,
    "daysLeft": 12,
    "staffPick": true,
    "spotlight": false,
    "createdAt": "2025-09-01T14:22:10+00:00",
    "launchedAt": "2025-10-15T16:00:00+00:00",
    "deadline": "2025-11-30T16:00:00+00:00",
    "sourceQuery": "board game"
}

Core Fields

Field	Type	Description
projectId	integer	Kickstarter numeric project ID.
slug	string	Project URL slug.
title	string	Project name.
blurb	string	Short one-line description.
state	string	Funding state (live, successful, failed, canceled, suspended).

Funding Metrics

Field	Type	Description
fundingGoal	number	Funding goal in the project's currency.
pledged	number	Amount pledged in the project's currency.
usdPledged	number	Amount pledged converted to USD.
backers	integer	Number of backers.
percentFunded	number	Percent of the goal funded (above 100 = overfunded).
daysLeft	integer	Days remaining (0 or negative once ended).
currency	string	Project currency code (ISO 4217).
currencySymbol	string	Currency symbol.

Creator & Category

Field	Type	Description
creator	string	Creator display name.
creatorId	integer	Creator numeric ID.
creatorSlug	string	Creator profile slug.
category	string	Sub-category name (e.g. "Tabletop Games").
categoryId	integer	Category numeric ID.
parentCategory	string	Top-level category name (e.g. "Games").

Location & Dates

Field	Type	Description
country	string	Project country code.
location	string	Human-readable location (city, state/country).
createdAt	string	Project creation timestamp (ISO 8601).
launchedAt	string	Campaign launch timestamp (ISO 8601).
deadline	string	Campaign end timestamp (ISO 8601).

Flags, Media & Source

Field	Type	Description
staffPick	boolean	Featured as a Kickstarter Staff Pick.
spotlight	boolean	In the post-campaign Spotlight.
url	string	Canonical project URL.
rewardsUrl	string	Direct URL to the rewards/pledge tiers section.
imageUrl	string	Project cover image URL.
sourceQuery	string	Which input (search term, URL, or filter combo) produced this row.

Tips for Best Results

• Study what wins by combining state: successful with sort: most_funded — this surfaces the top-raising completed campaigns in any category, the gold standard for "what backers reward".
• Spot proven demand with percentFunded — any value above 100 means the campaign is overfunded; sort by Most Funded and scan for breakouts well into the hundreds or thousands of percent.
• Catch final-stretch campaigns with sort: end_date and state: live — this is the "Ending soon" ordering, and last-minute pledge surges are common, so closing campaigns are useful momentum signals.
• Use staffPicks: true for editorially-vetted leads — these are hand-selected by Kickstarter's team and skew toward higher-quality, better-presented projects.
• Run multiple searchTerms in one job — each keyword paginates independently, and the sourceQuery field tags every row so you can tell which term it came from.
• Paste a Discover URL when you've already filtered on the site — anything you build in Kickstarter's own UI scrapes exactly as-is, no need to recreate it with input fields.
• Set maxResults: 0 for an exhaustive pull of a narrow niche — best paired with a tight category and location so the run stays focused. Kickstarter caps any single feed at roughly 2,500 projects, so narrow filters are how you reach the deeper data.

Pricing

$0.90 per 1,000 results — flat pay-per-result, slightly below the typical market rate for Kickstarter data.

Results	Estimated Cost
100	$0.09
1,000	$0.90
10,000	$9.00
100,000	$90.00

No compute charges — you only pay per result returned. Each project row counts as one result. Apify platform fees are additional.

Integrations

Export data in JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or RSS. Connect to 1,500+ apps via:

• Zapier / Make / n8n — Workflow automation
• Google Sheets — Direct spreadsheet export
• Slack / Email — Notifications on new results
• Webhooks — Trigger custom APIs on run completion
• Apify API — Full programmatic access

Legal & Ethical Use

This actor collects publicly available data from Kickstarter's Discover feed for research, analysis, and business intelligence. Use it responsibly: respect Kickstarter's Terms of Service, do not use the data to spam creators or backers, and comply with all applicable data-protection laws (including GDPR and CCPA) when handling any personal information. You are responsible for how you use the data you collect.