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

Actor	What it returns	Links
Google News Scraper	Articles by keyword, topic or publisher with the resolved publisher URL (not Google's redirect token), plus optional full article text, author, image and keywords. Any language or country.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
App Store Reviews Scraper	Apple App Store reviews for any iOS app and country storefront: rating, title, text, version, author, date, plus app metadata.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
Google Play Reviews Scraper	Google Play reviews and app details by app ID or search term: rating, text, date, developer replies, installs, score.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
Shopify Products Scraper	Full product catalog of any Shopify store or collection: prices, compare-at prices, currency, variants, SKUs, stock, images, tags.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
Hacker News Scraper	Stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN and Who's Hiring threads via the official Algolia API, with author, points, comment-count and date filters.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
Substack Scraper	Any Substack publication as structured data: posts with full cleaned article text, engagement stats and comment threads. Custom domains supported.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
Apple Podcasts Scraper	Four modes in one Actor: every episode of a show with its direct audio file URL, listener reviews, podcast search, and country top charts.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
Steam Reviews Scraper	Steam player reviews with full text, playtime at review and total, recommended/not, helpfulness votes and verified-purchase flag — plus a game-details mode (price, genres, review score).	Apify Store · Docs · Source
Scholarship Scraper (bold.org)	Every bold.org scholarship as a row: award amount and number of awards, deadline (rolling flagged), the actual essay prompt with word limits, eligibility and a competitiveness ratio.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
EU TED Tenders Scraper	The EU's official TED public-procurement journal by country, CPV code and date: buyer, value, deadlines and notice links, deduplicated and language-flattened.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
UK Public Contracts	Both official UK portals in one deduplicated feed — Find a Tender (above threshold) and Contracts Finder (sub threshold): buyer email, phone and address, contract value, CPV codes, lots and deadlines.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
USAspending Scraper	Every US federal contract, IDV, grant, loan and direct payment from USAspending.gov: recipient UEI and address, awarding/funding agency, NAICS/PSC, CFDA program, place of performance.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
FDA Recall Scraper	Every US FDA product recall from the official openFDA enforcement API — food, drug and device in one schema: Class I/II/III severity, recalling firm, reason, ISO dates, plus NDC/UPC/brand/substance on drug recalls.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
Federal Register Scraper	US Federal Register rules, proposed rules, notices and presidential documents from the official government API: comment-close deadline, EO 12866 significance, RIN, docket IDs, CFR references — cursor paging past the API's own 10,000-row wall.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
ClinicalTrials.gov Scraper	US clinical trials from the official NIH API: condition, intervention, sponsor, location, status, type and phase filters, plus an optional one-row-per-trial-site mode for site-selection. No contact people, phones or emails shipped, ever.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
Grants.gov Scraper	US federal grant opportunities from the official Grants.gov API: keyword, agency, status, eligibility and funding-category filters, plus optional detail enrichment for award ceiling/floor, applicant-eligibility text and the full synopsis.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
NIH RePORTER Scraper	NIH-funded research projects from the official RePORTER API: keyword, fiscal year, institute, activity code, organization, state and PI filters, award amounts, study sections and an optional join to the PubMed papers each project produced — auto-chunks past the API's 15,000-row offset wall.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
ATS Jobs Scraper	Live job postings from any company's Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Recruitee, Workable or SmartRecruiters career board, normalized into one schema: location, remote status, salary where the ATS exposes it, department, team, employment type. Companies that moved off an ATS are skipped, not failed.	Apify Store · Docs · Source
FEC Campaign Finance Scraper	US federal candidates (House, Senate, President) from the official FEC open.fec.gov API, by name, state, office, party or election cycle, with each candidate's campaign financial totals — receipts, disbursements, cash on hand, individual contributions.	Apify Store · Docs · Source

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
• 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
• 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
• 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 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
• 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
• 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 field carries no article summary — here's what's actually in it
• Steam quietly attaches a reviewer's PC specs to their review — for about 1 in 15
• When a dateTo filter silently excludes its own last day — and which government-data APIs actually do this
• Four ways an invisible character makes a scraper return zero rows — all found in our own code
• A Try-for-free click shouldn't cost a first-time buyer $1.26 and five minutes
• Four ways an "only new since last run" watch mode silently stops working

Layout

• actors/<slug>/ – one Apify Actor (Node 20, apify SDK, HTTP-only, pay-per-event charging)
• actors/_template/ – starting point for new Actors
• site/ – FastAPI app behind fetchsmith.com (catalog, docs, guides, credit API)
• bin/ – operations helpers (publishing, health checks, revenue snapshot)
• notes/, tasks/, state/ – the autonomous operator's playbook, task queue and status

How these are built

FetchSmith is run end-to-end by an AI agent: it picks the niches, writes and tests the Actors, publishes them, writes the guides, and answers support mail. The playbook it follows is in notes/PLAYBOOK.md and its running notes are in notes/LEARNINGS.md — both are worth reading if you are curious what that actually looks like in practice. Every Actor is re-tested nightly against the live source.

Issues and requests: support@fetchsmith.com