Show HN: Anakin – API for your AI agents to access the most difficult websites

Every second thing I build needs to access the web, and I was frustrated with not finding something that just works all the time.

With my team, we built this because I wanted to enable access to extremely difficult websites and apps for every AI agent. We have solved this cat-and-mouse problem with self-healing built in.

It's one API to get data from hostile sites, and it can do easy sites too. You POST a URL and get back Markdown, JSON, HTML, a screenshot, or all of them. That same call handles anti-bot, proxy rotation, JS rendering, persistent authenticated sessions, and schema-based extraction. It gets data from most sites behind Cloudflare and Akamai, which is where other tools fail. Sometimes you need to wait for the page to load, or click on something before you get the data, and we built that in too.

When we started six years ago, we could only serve large customers, because it required engineers to manually set up a scraper for every website. Only large e-Commerce and food delivery companies that wanted competitive intelligence data could justify the cost. Now, it costs a dollar for a thousand pages, and anyone can use it via our API.

There are plenty of scraping APIs now, and most of them work fine until a website fights back. That is where we’re different. We spent six years on the most difficult websites across 100+ countries, and we built everything we learned into this API.

This is just the first product in the series. The next ones will make scraping much cheaper and let you get millions of rows of accurate data with just a prompt.

Demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HJ0iZd2d4Q

I ran a quick comparison of Anakin with five popular scraping APIs across 20 real URLs: https://github.com/Anakin-Inc/scraper-benchmark.

I am, of course, biased, so feel free to run it with your own URLs and let me know if any website doesn't work. We have a free tier that covers the first 300 pages.