DEV Community: Hermeny Santos

I Built a Free Shopify Competitor Intelligence API

Hermeny Santos — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:24:04 +0000

I Built a Free Shopify Competitor Intelligence API — Here's How

Every Shopify store owner wants to know: What are my competitors charging? What products do they carry? Are they running sales?

There are tools that do this — but they charge $200-500/month. I built a free API that does it in seconds, deployed on Cloudflare Workers.

What It Does

ShopIntel API analyzes any Shopify store's products, prices, and inventory through their public /products.json endpoint. No API keys needed for the target store. No proxies. No browser automation.

7 Endpoints:

Analyze — Full store breakdown (product count, price ranges, vendors, categories)
Products — List all products with variants and pricing
Compare — Side-by-side comparison of two stores
Search — Find products by keyword across a store
Detect — Check if any URL is a Shopify store
Price Changes — Track price differences between snapshots
Price Alerts — Flag products that breach price thresholds

Real Example: Analyzing Allbirds

curl -X POST https://shopintel-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev/store/analyze \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://allbirds.com"}'

Response (trimmed):

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "summary": {
      "totalProducts": 700,
      "totalVariants": 7541,
      "averagePrice": 85.04,
      "priceRange": { "min": 2, "max": 500 },
      "onSaleCount": 287,
      "outOfStockCount": 2
    },
    "productTypes": [
      { "name": "Shoes", "count": 564 },
      { "name": "Apparel", "count": 57 },
      { "name": "Socks", "count": 42 }
    ]
  }
}

700 products analyzed in under 3 seconds. No auth required. Just a URL.

Why Shopify's `/products.json` Is the Best Scraping Niche

Most scraping businesses are fragile:

Google Maps — Anti-bot updates break scrapers monthly
Amazon — Aggressive blocking, requires expensive proxies
Instagram/TikTok — APIs change constantly

Shopify's /products.json is different:

Intentionally public — Shopify exposes it on every store
Structured JSON — No HTML parsing needed
Stable — Same format for years
No anti-bot — No CAPTCHAs, no IP blocking, no proxies needed
Huge market — 4.8M active Shopify stores

Tech Stack

Cloudflare Workers — Serverless, globally distributed, free tier
Hono — Ultrafast TypeScript web framework
TypeScript — Strict mode, fully typed
Vitest — 17 tests, full coverage
Cost: $0/month to run

How the Compare Feature Works

The /store/compare endpoint fetches products from two stores in parallel and finds overlapping products by title matching:

curl -X POST https://shopintel-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev/store/compare \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "store_a": "https://allbirds.com",
    "store_b": "https://kotn.com"
  }'

It returns:

Product counts for each store
Average prices for each store
Overlapping products with price differences and percentages

This is gold for e-commerce businesses doing competitive analysis.

Use Cases

Competitor Price Monitoring — Track when competitors change prices
Market Research — Understand what product types dominate a niche
Dropshipping Research — Find products and compare supplier prices
SEO/Marketing — Understand competitor product catalogs
Investment Research — Analyze DTC brand product strategies

Try It Free

API: RapidAPI - ShopIntel API

Source Code: GitHub - shopintel-api

Base URL: https://shopintel-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev

Free tier gives you 25 requests/day — enough to analyze a competitor store daily.

Built with Hono + Cloudflare Workers in a weekend. If you found this useful, drop a star on the repo!

I Built a Free Swiss Army Knife API for Developers — 20+ Tools, One Endpoint

Hermeny Santos — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:54:07 +0000

Ever needed a quick QR code, a SHA-256 hash, or a URL slug — and didn't want to install yet another npm package or spin up a whole service?

I built NexTool API — a single API that bundles 20+ developer utilities into one key. It's free, fast (<100ms responses), and runs on Cloudflare Workers.

What's Inside

Tool	Endpoint	What it does
QR Code	`POST /qr/generate`	Generate QR codes as SVG or BMP with custom colors
Meta Scraper	`GET /meta/extract?url=...`	Extract Open Graph, Twitter cards, favicon from any URL
Text Analytics	`POST /text/analyze`	Word count, readability score, keyword density
Slug Generator	`POST /text/slug`	Clean URL slugs from any text
Hashing	`POST /crypto/hash`	MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512
Encoding	`POST /crypto/encode`	Base64, URL encode/decode
JWT Decode	`POST /crypto/jwt-decode`	Decode JWT tokens (great for debugging)
UUID	`GET /random/uuid`	Generate UUID v4s
Passwords	`GET /random/password`	Secure passwords with configurable rules
Lorem Ipsum	`GET /random/lorem`	Generate placeholder text
IP Geolocation	`GET /ip/lookup`	Country, city, timezone from IP
Color Convert	`POST /color/convert`	HEX ↔ RGB ↔ HSL ↔ CMYK
Contrast Check	`POST /color/contrast`	WCAG AA/AAA compliance check
JSON Validate	`POST /json/validate`	Check if JSON is valid
JSON Format	`POST /json/format`	Pretty-print or minify JSON
JSON Diff	`POST /json/diff`	Compare two JSON objects
JSON → CSV	`POST /json/to-csv`	Convert JSON arrays to CSV

Quick Examples

Generate a QR code:

curl -X POST https://nextool-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev/qr/generate \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"text":"https://dev.to","format":"svg","size":300}'

Analyze text readability:

curl -X POST https://nextool-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev/text/analyze \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"text":"Your blog post content here..."}'

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "words": 5,
    "readingTime": { "minutes": 1, "seconds": 1 },
    "readability": {
      "fleschReadingEase": 86.7,
      "difficulty": "Easy"
    },
    "keywords": [{ "word": "blog", "count": 1, "density": 20 }]
  }
}

Check color contrast for accessibility:

curl -X POST https://nextool-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev/color/contrast \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"foreground":"#333333","background":"#ffffff"}'

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "ratio": 12.63,
    "wcag": {
      "aa": { "normal": true, "large": true },
      "aaa": { "normal": true, "large": true }
    }
  }
}

Why I Built This

I was tired of:

Installing 5 different packages for simple utility operations
Hitting rate limits on free APIs that only do one thing
Managing API keys from 8 different providers

So I bundled everything into one API. One key, one consistent response format, 20+ tools.

Tech Stack

Runtime: Cloudflare Workers (TypeScript)
Framework: Hono
Cost to run: $0 (Cloudflare free tier)
Response times: <100ms globally

Try It

The API is live right now:

Base URL: https://nextool-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev
RapidAPI: NexTool API on RapidAPI (free tier available)
GitHub: HermenySantos/nextool-api

Hit the root URL to see all available endpoints:

curl https://nextool-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev/

The free tier gives you 1,500 requests/month — enough for personal projects and testing.

Would love to hear what tools you'd want added next. Drop a comment!

DEV Community: Hermeny Santos

I Built a Free Shopify Competitor Intelligence API

I Built a Free Shopify Competitor Intelligence API — Here's How

What It Does

7 Endpoints:

Real Example: Analyzing Allbirds

Why Shopify's /products.json Is the Best Scraping Niche

Tech Stack

How the Compare Feature Works

Use Cases

Try It Free

I Built a Free Swiss Army Knife API for Developers — 20+ Tools, One Endpoint

What's Inside

Quick Examples

Why I Built This

Tech Stack

Try It

Why Shopify's `/products.json` Is the Best Scraping Niche