Y Combinator Jobs Scraper | YC Startup Hiring Data
Pricing
from $2.00 / 1,000 results
Scrape Y Combinator's Work at a Startup board: every YC-backed company currently hiring, with role, company, YC batch, location, salary and detected tech stack. A small, high-signal board - every row is a funded startup. No browser, no proxy, no login. Schedule it daily to track new postings.
Measured against the live Store listing: asking for the advertised maximum of 50 returned
20 (40%), and the count reproduced exactly across separate runs — so this is the board's real
inventory, not a flaky scrape. The status message said only Returned 20 YCombinator postings., which a
buyer who asked for 50 cannot tell apart from a broken Actor.
finishRun() now receives requested: maxJobs and appends the reason:
RUN_STATS also carries requested and boardExhausted. Logic and tests live in
apify-actor-kit (inventory.ts); src/kit/ here is generated.
Adopts the shared src/kit/, generated from apify-actor-kit .
Every filter here was previously a bare continue, so a run that returned nothing
gave no clue which filter emptied it. Rejections are now counted per filter and
surfaced in the message and in RUN_STATS.filteredOut. A refused listing page is
counted too, so blocked is distinguishable from "no postings found".
failOnZeroResults (default true).
The breakdown made both measurable in a single run, on 2026-08-27:
| input | measured | now |
|---|---|---|
equityOnly: true | rejected 20 of 20 | titled rarely matches; description states that YC's list page does not state equity for most postings, so the filter nearly always empties the result |
techStackFilter (devops/kubernetes/aws) | rejected 19 of 20 | description states the stack is inferred from a very short title and blurb, and suggests filtering client-side for recall |
Neither is silently broken any more: an emptied run now fails and names the filter that did it. A filter that silently does not apply is a refund request.
maxJobs advertised a ceiling it cannot reachThe schema offered up to 1,000. YCombinator's jobs page is a single un-paginated list — measured 2026-08-27 it carried 20 postings, and this actor does not paginate. Maximum corrected to 50.
Dataset.pushData() per run instead of one call per row.Documentation only. No behavior changes; build 0.0.3 is unmodified.
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md, docs/DEVELOPMENT.md, docs/YC-DOM.md,
docs/IMPROVEMENT-PLAN.md, and CLAUDE.md..actor/dataset_schema.json — the output surface was previously undeclared.Two platform runs on 2026-08-13:
| Input | Rows | Cost | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
maxJobs: 10 | 10 | $0.0010 | 5 s |
maxJobs: 100 | 20 | $0.0052 | 43 s |
20 rows is source exhaustion: one server-rendered page, no pagination. Runs on CheerioCrawler over
plain HTTP with no browser, which is why it is among the cheapest actors in the portfolio.
Data quality is the best of the TypeScript actors — ycBatch, role, companyDescription and a
genuine multi-currency salary parser (USD/GBP/EUR/INR) all populate reliably.
equityOnly: true returns zero rows, always. hasEquity is derived from title + company
blurb + role, which never mention equity, so it is false on every row.li.my-2.flex.h-auto.w-full, …). Any YC restyle
breaks extraction silently. Most fragile actor in the portfolio.jobType, department, role, salary) are read by array index — a missing chip
shifts every later field into the wrong chip.maxJobs advertises a maximum of 1,000; ~20 is achievable.postedAt is relative prose ("2 days ago"), not a timestamp.techStack is matched against title + company blurb + role, never a job description — empty on
~8 of 10 rows.K/M multiplier is applied string-wide rather than per number.roles filter is bypassed for jobs with no detected role.jobId fallback embeds Date.now().department is extracted into a local variable and never emitted.All are itemized and prioritized in docs/IMPROVEMENT-PLAN.md, which flags one investigation to run
before any of the DOM work: check whether YC ships its listings as embedded JSON, since that
would replace the fragile selectors and solve pagination in a single change.
No changelog was kept. Build 0.0.3 is the deployed build as of 2026-08-13; the last source commit
was 2025-11-16.