I built a free, local LinkedIn Scraper because $49/mo SaaS is a rip-off (Vibe Coding)
The indie hacker's paradox: We automate everything in our product. Nothing in our distribution.
Spent the last month watching indie hackers ship amazing products. Beautiful code. Great UX. Then they manually check Reddit twice a week for users. The irony is painful.
The Problem: I needed leads from LinkedIn. I looked at existing tools. They wanted $49/mo just to scrape some emails. Plus, they wanted my cookies uploaded to their cloud. No thanks.
The Solution (Vibe Coding): I'm a dad and a dev who believes in "Local-first". So I used Cursor + Claude 3.5 Sonnet and built my own Chrome Extension in a weekend.
No Backend: Runs 100% in your browser.
No Subscription: It's a simple ZIP file.
Privacy: Data stays on your machine.
It scrapes potential leads from LinkedIn comment sections and exports them to CSV.
The "Anti-SaaS" Experiment: Instead of charging a monthly fee, I'm selling it as a lifetime tool. And because I want to give back to the community, I made a Free Developer Build available for anyone who wants to try the core features without paying a dime.
You can grab the free version here: [https://digitalmercenary.gumroad.com/l/jarwm]
Question for the community: Does anyone else feel like the "subscription fatigue" is getting real? Or am I just being cheap? 😅
Hey Jason one question, does the free version scrap everything like search results, personal profiles, companies.. etc or just comments like the free version? I'm sorry if what I'm saying doesn't make sense I'm not the most technical person out there :_)
No I feel it too ngl, I'm afraid we will have to pay subscriptions for air next. Thank you so much for this downloaded the free version and will see how it goes. You're awsome Jason, I don't have kids and I can never imagine myself having the time to build smth from scratch, kudos to you.
Hey Zahiya, sorry I missed this back then.
I’ve decided to stop and archive this project. At the time, I was reacting to a platform issue and built too quickly, but after thinking more about platform rules, user trust, and the risks around LinkedIn scraping, I don’t feel comfortable continuing or recommending the tool anymore.
Thanks for taking the time to try it, and sorry I didn’t follow up sooner.