ABOUT
The tool and the human behind it.
The tool
Scrapefruit is a web scraping application built for researchers, journalists, and developers who need to collect data from the web without fighting anti-bot systems all day.
The core idea is the cascade system: start with the fastest, simplest method (HTTP requests) and automatically escalate through increasingly powerful tools (Playwright, Puppeteer, AI-controlled browsers) when you hit blocks. No manual intervention required.
Recent additions include local LLM integration via Ollama for processing scraped content without API costs, and video transcription via yt-dlp and Whisper for extracting text from YouTube, Twitter/X, and 1000+ other platforms.
Tech stack
The creator
James Amditis
I'm a journalist and developer based in Philadelphia. I build tools that help people collect and make sense of information.
Scrapefruit grew out of my own needs doing research and reporting. Existing tools were either too simple (couldn't handle modern anti-bot systems) or too complex (required writing custom code for every site). I wanted something in between.
License & contributing
License
Scrapefruit is released under the PolyForm Noncommercial License. You can use it freely for non-commercial purposes.
Read the full license →Contributing
Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues for bugs or feature requests, or submit pull requests.
Open an issue →