We got tired of fixing selectors.
Extracto is a small team that has shipped and maintained production web scrapers for years. We built the tool we wished existed.
Every scraping project starts the same way: a clean schedule, a tidy parser, a feeling that this time it will be different. Then the target site ships a redesign, a class name changes, an A/B test rolls out, and the selectors you wrote start returning nulls. The data looks fine until it silently is not, and someone downstream finds out the hard way.
We spent enough years on that treadmill to want off it. The bet behind Extracto is simple: describe the data you want as a JSON schema, and let a language model read the page the way a person would, while a validation boundary guarantees the output matches your schema before it ever leaves the API. No CSS selectors. No XPath. No 2 a.m. parser fixes.
What we believe
- Validated beats best-effort. A scraper that returns plausible-but-wrong data is worse than one that fails loudly. We validate every response against your schema so your pipeline never ingests broken data.
- Honesty over hype. Accuracy drops on heavily JavaScript-driven or auth-gated pages, and we say so. We publish real benchmarks rather than marketing numbers.
- Scraping responsibly. We follow robots.txt by default and rate-limit politely. We build a tool; you are responsible for using it within each site's terms and applicable law. We will not help anyone target private or personal data at scale.
Where we are now
Extracto is live. Sign up free and you get an API key in minutes, with a free plan that needs no credit card and paid tiers when you outgrow it. The live demo on the homepage runs the same extraction pipeline your key calls, and you still get hands-on support directly from the founder. We would rather grow slowly with people who get value than chase vanity numbers. If you want to talk, the door is open.