I Built a Pay-Per-Result Hacker News Scraper on Apify

The Problem

I needed structured Hacker News data for a side project — trending stories, scores, comment counts. The HN API exists but requires pagination, filtering, and batch fetching logic.

So I built an Apify Actor that handles all of this and published it for free.

What It Does

HN Top Stories Scraper lets you:

• Scrape top, new, best, ask, and show stories
• Filter by minimum score, comment count, or keyword
• Get up to 500 stories per run
• Output as JSON, CSV, or connect to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier

It uses the official HN Firebase API — no scraping, no proxies needed.

Example

Get the top 50 AI stories with 100+ upvotes:

{
  "count": 50,
  "type": "top",
  "minScore": 100,
  "keyword": "AI"
}

Returns:

{
  "id": 12345678,
  "title": "Show HN: AI tool that does X",
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "score": 342,
  "comments": 89,
  "author": "username",
  "hn_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678"
}

Use Cases

• RSS replacement: Schedule runs to get stories as structured data
• Competitor monitoring: Filter by your company name
• Content curation: Feed into newsletters or Slack
• Trend analysis: Track what gets high scores over time
• Job monitoring: Scrape Who is Hiring threads

Pricing

Pay-per-result: ~$0.01 per 1,000 stories. Free tier available — no credit card needed.

Compare that to the $5-19/month flat-rate competitors charge.

Try It

https://apify.com/cryptosignals/hn-top-stories

Feedback welcome — this is my first published Actor.