The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Strategic decision · 2019–2026
ScrapingBee bets on content and API reliability to bootstrap past $1M ARR
Two French founders pivot from failed pricing apps to a scraping API, bet on content plus recurring B2B revenue, and reach $1M ARR in 2.5 years
ScrapingBee
What the business is
ScrapingBee sells a web scraping API: a developer sends a page URL and gets back clean HTML or structured data, with proxy rotation, headless-browser rendering and anti-blocking handled by the service and billed per API call.
How it started
Kevin Sahin and Pierre de Wulf, friends since high school in the south of France, first built ShopToList (2017), a B2C price-drop extension they could not monetize and sold to a web agency, then PricingBot (2018), a B2B price-monitoring SaaS that got its first paying customer but never traction. While building PricingBot they leaned on scraping tools and found them hard to use, slow, unreliable and opaque, so in mid-2019 they built a scraping API MVP, recruited about ten free beta testers, and in June closed the beta and started charging — the first customer arrived 50 minutes after the first email.
What happened
Their two bets were recurring revenue from customers with regular scraping needs and content as the scalable acquisition channel. The first guide, 'Web scraping without getting blocked', drew 20,000 visitors and has since passed 70,000 reads; channels tried in October 2019 were abandoned as a money-wasting distraction, and they later traded 10,000 free API calls for 15-minute user interviews, reaching about 100 conversations in under three months. They joined TinySeed in May 2020, passed $10k MRR in November 2020 (and profitability), doubled to $20k MRR within three months, made their first hire in June 2021, and crossed $1M ARR in November 2021 — about 2.5 years after launch.
How it ended up
Still running as of 2026-09-06: scrapingbee.com markets a broader API line (HTML, AI extraction, fast search, dedicated Amazon/Google/YouTube endpoints), claims 4,000+ developers and SOC 2 Type II, and keeps maintaining the anti-blocking guide that started the content engine.
Background
ScrapingBee sells a web scraping API: developers send a page URL and get back clean HTML or structured data, with proxies, headless browsers and anti-blocking handled by the service and billed per API call.
The company was the founders' third attempt. Kevin Sahin and Pierre de Wulf had built ShopToList, a B2C price-drop extension they could not monetize and sold off, then PricingBot, a B2B price-monitoring SaaS that got real customers but never traction. The scraping tools they leaned on while building PricingBot were slow, unreliable and opaque, so in mid-2019 they pivoted to selling the scraping plumbing itself, charging from day one — the first customer arrived 50 minutes after the first email.
The bet was two-fold: customers with regular scraping needs would keep paying for a dependable API, and content could be the scalable acquisition channel. The first guide, 'Web scraping without getting blocked', brought 20,000 visitors quickly and has since passed 70,000 reads; other channels tried in late 2019 were abandoned as distractions. They joined TinySeed in May 2020, $10k MRR arrived in November 2020, $20k MRR three months later, and $1M ARR in November 2021.
The write-up reached Hacker News' front page on 2022-01-21 with 316 points and 148 comments, and as of the 2026-09-06 snapshot the company is still live: the homepage claims 4,000+ developers and sells AI extraction, fast search and dedicated scraping APIs.
What has to be true
- Both earlier products proved demand for price data; the missing piece was dependable scraping, which the founders knew from building it for their own tools.
- Charging from the first beta exit forced early revenue and honest feedback instead of a long free-user runway.
- Kevin had already written a Java web-scraping book, so SEO content was a compounding asset the founder could produce better than competitors.
- No traditional VC meant no growth-at-all-costs pressure; TinySeed funded runway while a slow content channel matured.
What can be applied
If the end product stalls, sell the painful infrastructure underneath it; then ride one compounding channel — an author-founder's SEO content — instead of scattering across many.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-06, ScrapingBee is still operating on the model built through 2021: scrapingbee.com sells HTML, AI-extraction, fast-search and dedicated Amazon/Google/YouTube APIs with tiered subscriptions from $19/month, claims 4,000+ developers and SOC 2 Type II, and the original anti-blocking guide remains live and maintained. The founders' write-up reports $10k MRR in November 2020 and $1M ARR in November 2021, about 2.5 years after the API launched.
Sources
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