FetchSmith

Pay-per-result web data extraction tools. Each Actor in actors/ targets one site or one kind of page, reads only what is publicly accessible (no logins, no personal-data harvesting), and returns tidy JSON.

Every Actor is HTTP-only — no headless browser anywhere in the stack. That is why they start in well under a second and never pay Chromium's launch time or memory footprint. We benchmarked the difference on a 1 vCPU / 2 GB box: 0.2 s and 50 structured records vs. 7 s, 146 MB and 83 unstructured links for the same page.

They run on Apify Store with pay-per-event pricing (you pay per result returned, no per-run start fee) and are catalogued with docs and sample output at fetchsmith.com.

Actors

Guides

Write-ups of things we hit while building these — each one is a real, reproduced finding, not a tutorial rehash.

• Eight government JSON APIs that need no key — and the specific way each one lies to you
• Does a watchChanges deadline alert actually fire? We seeded 711 opportunities and forced it to find out
• Google News RSS gives you encoded redirect links — here's how to resolve them
• We tested "JSON-LD only" article extraction against 8 real news sites. It got 0.
• Apple's App Store review feed has holes — and whether you hit one depends on your HTTP client
• Every Shopify store's catalog is public JSON — no login, no browser, no API key
• Shopify's bulk products.json hides stock counts and barcodes — the per-product endpoint doesn't
• Hacker News's search API: commas mean AND, not OR
• HN search caps every query at 1,000 hits, no matter what nbHits claims
• A Hacker News comment has no URL of its own — so GitHub links get attributed to the wrong repo
• We timed HTTP-only scraping against a headless browser on the same page. It wasn't close.
• Apple Podcasts has a public JSON API — four endpoints, no key, and one that doesn't exist
• Steam's review API is public JSON — but three of its silences look identical
• SAM.gov's 10,000-row depth cap doesn't promise 10,000 rows
• SAM.gov's wage-determination search doesn't match trades — and a short query silently becomes a different kind of search
• A zero in federal program funding history doesn't mean zero dollars
• The filter that isn't there: three government APIs return the whole index when a filter name is dropped
• Next.js App Router ships your whole database table in the HTML — bold.org's RSC flight stream, decoded
• The EU publishes every public contract as JSON — in 24 languages, with the CPV code repeated eight times
• The EU's tender deadline isn't in the field called "deadline" — 48/50 live in a different one
• A Substack paywalled post returns a body_html that looks complete — it's a preview, and audience won't tell you
• The UK publishes every public contract as OCDS JSON — and the money isn't where you'd look
• The US publishes every federal award as JSON — but you can't ask for a contract and a grant in the same request
• The FDA publishes every product recall as JSON with no API key — but you can't page past row 25,000, and only drugs come with a barcode
• The Federal Register API says it has 10,000 documents. It doesn't — and the fix is already in the response
• Google Play has no public reviews API — but the store's own JSON endpoint does
• Google Play's review API carries two fields almost nobody reads — a full star histogram and a hidden per-review "aspect" breakdown
• Google Play's "developer replied" watch event only fires for replies added after you start watching
• Substack's archive API returns a body_html field for every post — it's just always null
• The ClinicalTrials.gov API silently caps pageSize at 1000 — and its phase filter doesn't exist where you'd look for it
• Grants.gov's search API never returns an error — a typo in your filter just silently returns zero results
• Grants.gov's search API has two opposite silent failures — and only one of them is safe
• NIH RePORTER's 15,000-row wall doesn't error — it silently shrinks your page, and a plural typo returns 2.97 million unfiltered rows
• App Store, Google Play and Steam reviews — three JSON APIs, three unrelated meanings of "empty"
• Substack, Apple Podcasts, Google News and Hacker News — four free APIs where the first response isn't the finished product
• Six ATS job-board JSON APIs, six different ideas of what a job posting is
• The FEC publishes campaign finance as key-free JSON — and its three rate limits contradict each other
• The App Store's per-star ratings breakdown isn't in any of Apple's APIs — it's in the page's JSON blob
• Workday's public career-site API has no auth, a hard page-size cap, and no department field
• Google News RSS's
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